


James Sirius Potter's Ill-Advised Guide to Being Stupid in Love

by butterbeerbitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Auror Teddy Lupin, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Fluff and Angst, Harry Potter Next Generation, Jealous James, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV First Person, POV James Sirius Potter, Teen Angst, do british people talk like this, im crap at titles, im so sorry, james sirius potters ill-advised guide to being a thirsty thot, like healthy amounts of angst, shitfaced hanky panky, unhealthy amounts of teenage infatuation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-06-18 19:23:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15492951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterbeerbitch/pseuds/butterbeerbitch
Summary: Some things snuck up on you. And then some things snuck up on you just to cave your head in with a meat cleaver.Because when Edward Remus Lupin started growing out of Andromeda’s potato sack hand-me-downs, when his voice crashed so low you felt it between your legs when he laughed, no more Silly String for limbs, no more Muggle deathcore T-shirts, when he started shaving, sauntering, snogging girls behind Greenhouse Three, when he couldn't stop smiling like a Lumos done right -James forgot to duck.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HEIYO 
> 
> i know half of you are going to kill me for updating anything other than NHC (because it's been like...like we're all 80 now hey hi). NHC is currently on hold because i'm working on something with someone insanely, insanely fantastic, but there's so much going on besides that, and everything in my life is kind of - everywhere, and a lot of stuff is on hold but also not on hold because it's so much and it just can't stop, and like??? IM MOVING TO THE MOON
> 
> anyways i found this fic in my this-will-never-see-the-light-of-day folder and i needed something chill to work on for now. plus a lot of you guys have been asking me if i died which - i'm ok and i love y'all - so here's another childhood friend fic (which will be my guilty pleasure until the day i die...the 90's chick flick glow ups...the pining...its just wow Excellent)
> 
> so teddy's three years older. jamies a thirsty hoe. that is all

**James (16)**

  

I guessed some things snuck up on you. And then some things snuck up on you just to cave your head in with a fucking meat cleaver.

The kind Aunt Fleur used when she invited everyone to the kitchen for a demonstration of how to make beef marrow stuffing, pieces confettied across the walls, her cannonade laughter - too big to come out of a body so tiny but somehow did…because Fleur…and also because Aunt Fleur was secretly off her trolley - everyone left wondering whether they should shield their eyes or slam their hands against their ears.

And I guessed when those meat-cleaver-wielding things snuck up on you, it was kind of your fault. A lot your fault. My fault. It was my fault. Because it was a fucking meat cleaver. Because when Edward Remus Lupin started growing out of Andromeda’s potato sack hand-me-downs, I forgot to duck. When his voice crashed so low you felt it between your legs when he laughed, when he didn’t have to wear orthopedic headgear to bed, no more Silly String for limbs, no more Muggle deathcore band shirts that made Andromeda’s head burst through the roof because, _’Merlin’s beard, Edward! You look like you skin cats for a living!’_

When he stopped staring at the ground and dove into anything he looked at, I forgot to duck. When he started sauntering, I forgot to duck. When he started shaving, started snogging girls behind Greenhouse Three, got into trouble for setting gnomes free in the boy's bathrooms. And then his hands. His hands so big he could lift me up so I could reach the cereal on the kitchen cupboard, fingers caged around my waist, digging in. 

During none of it did I stop and think that maybe it would be a bad idea to let him slip into the frayed corners of my spank bank fantasies. Shoulder to shoulder with Merwyn Finwick and half the Tutshill Tornados. Or maybe all of the Tutshill Tornados. Maybe sometimes all of the Tutshill Tornados at the same time (but only when I was being a sicko and Al wasn’t home to complain about me hogging the shower). There was something about hands wrapped around broomsticks, something about Quidditch butts. ' _Almost as good as a football tush'_ , I’d heard Aunt Fleur purr to my mum once. And, yeah, almost _._ Almost as good as Teddy’s joggers-clad arse sliding down his broom when he caught a bludger with his hands during practice. A bludger. With his hands. (I’d gotten off to weirder things.)

So maybe it was my fault. It was. And Teddy’s. Fuck Teddy. Because who in the name of god had allowed him to look like that?

Every December he flooed into our living room, glowing so warm he made the air clump up, and every December I wanted to lock myself in my room and scream. And wank a little.

I didn’t know why I’d hoped this Christmas would be any different.

Wine glasses clinking, Aunt Fleur making the walls fall down with her bullet-hail guffaws, the creak of the Burrow, pots and pans hovering through the room, bumping Dad against the head because he’d had one too many Firewhiskeys to walk straight. Al and Louis were playing Gobstones. Al was awful at it, too daft and too easy to read, and I didn’t know why he kept agreeing to play against the president of the bloody Hogwarts Gobstones Club himself. Louis, who had been National Gobstones Champion three years in a row.

 _Gobstones_ _Champion._

How, to this day, his knob hadn’t been chopped off was a mystery.

Chewing on my cheek, I wondered how knob-less people peed when the electric blast of Floo Powder made the house shake. Everyone’s shoulders jerked. Aunt Fleur’s delighted shrieks. I turned towards the living room, the steaming fireplace.

And then all that blue, ultramarine, glowing like those phosphorescent fish that lived so deep under the sea they’d never seen the sun. When I was a kid, I’d sworn Teddy had been dunked headfirst into a tub of moonkshood.

"Merry Christmas!" Teddy’s eyes beamed - because they were always beaming, beaming like he had torches duct-taped to his head. And his hands, and his Adam’s apple, and his jeans, the way they fit him in ways I wouldn’t get mine to fit, ever. I stared at the belt peeking through the misbuttoned hem of his shirt, the clunky buckle sparking.

Maybe it was the eggnog Al had smuggled out of the liquor cabinet when everyone had been too busy digging into their presents - but I wanted to tumble off the couch and crawl on my knees, sink my teeth into the inky leather.

_Merry fucking Christmas, Teddy._

"Merry Christmas, love." Mum stumbled off the couch, hair blazing almost as bright as his when she pulled him in for a hug.

He’d brought someone this time, a girl with a mouth so red it beat every time she spoke. He called her a friend when Uncle Bill started whistling, but I caught them kissing in the stairwell. Teddy’s big veiny hands cradling her waist, holding on so tight I swore he’d crack her. The way they moulded into each other until I couldn’t tell them apart. A brewing mass of Teddy and girl, girl and Teddy. His fingers sliding up to pull her hair out of her ponytail. Her red mouth throbbing like a pulse.

And when that meat cleaver came swooping down this time, I didn't bother ducking. 

A big smash to my face, and my chest, and my stomach. My feet for good measure, so I couldn’t get away, so I’d have to keep watching, stuck at the bottom watching that abomination of clothing and skin unfurl.

Teddy’s hands slid up her side. The swell of her hips in that dress. The way she looked at him like she was about to fall asleep. His fingers found her front, the hem of her dress licking up her thighs as he dipped his hand between her legs. The sound she made. Like when you stepped on Crookshank’s tail by accident. And his brows scrunched, mouth twitching, until he softened, until he smiled.

I felt all the things inside of me drop to the floor.

It was the kind of smile I thought he only reserved for us, the kind that looked like a Lumos done right, like the very first time, that hiccup in your stomach when the tip of your wand flashed in the dark, and you swore nothing in the whole wide world - _nothing_ \- would ever feel this good.

 

◆

 

"You’ve got some stuff - " I pointed at the corner of my mouth. Teddy gazed down at me through shreds of snow, the cigarette, the Firewhiskey in his hand smoothing over all his edges. Not that he had many. Not that it bothered me. Not that I was in any position to let anything about him bother me at all.

But it was so hard when he looked like this. Hair almost as windblown as his limbs, his coat flapping, his torch eyes. He looked like he’d been kissed wide open. And, like always, every time, kissed by someone who wasn’t me.

"Oh." Teddy’s hand came up to rub the leftover lipstick away. He grinned, opening his mouth to laugh but nothing came out. It was just the wind and the crunch of snow under our boots. The sounds of everyone inside dulled to a mumble.

"Do you like her?" I asked, hesitating when he handed me his glass. Teddy leaned against the window and looked inside. Mum and Dad were slow dancing with everyone else, swaying along to Lily strumming on her guitar (tone-deaf…but nobody was sober enough to care). Aunt Fleur passed out in Bill’s lap. The Christmas lights blinking, green and red and white. The family portraits on the fireplace caught in a dizzy loop. 

And then there was her. Lipstick - what I’d chosen to call her because I hadn’t bothered to remember her name - sitting on the sofa with Al, his hands whirling through the air, cheeks pink in the warmth of the living room. I couldn’t blame him. She was every single girl Teddy pulled, florid and ferocious like a deity. Gran had called Teddy’s last girlfriend a bloody Sistine Madonna. 

Teddy leaned his forehead against the glass, his breath all fog. I could feel the snow leak into my boots. I didn’t think I minded. I couldn’t feel my feet anyways, couldn’t feel a single thought in my head.

Clearing his throat, he shrugged and said, "She’s nice..."

"I bet." I stared at her boobs oozing out of that dress before chugging the whiskey in one go. I tried to swallow away the steam left sticking to the back of my throat. I coughed. Teddy chuckled when I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It made my brain sing.

"I don’t know." He sighed, flicking his cigarette into the snow and shoving his hands into the pockets of his coat. I wanted to shove my hands in there too, feel him wrap his fingers around my wrist. I bet he could hold both of them in just one palm.

I looked away, looked at the cigarette fizzing in the snow. My face felt cold enough to chip right off.

"I don’t know," he said again. He shrugged. "I guess it’s kind of - " He shrugged again. "It’s nice to have someone."

And I expected him to gaze back into the house, to look at his nice-someone-to-have. But he was still looking at me, smiling that Lumos Smile that didn’t feel as special as it used to now.

I nodded like I knew. I wish I did. I knew what it was like to want to have someone, to set yourself on fire for it, yank your brain apart for it, wanting to drum your fists against every inch of your body, beating, yelling, grinding your teeth, to need it so much you thought you might choke yourself.

I bet it was nice to have someone. But it was the end of everything to want them when you shouldn't.

Teddy blinked. He was big enough to curl over me. I stared at his mouth. He still hadn’t gotten all of the lipstick, a thick red smudge stuck to the corner like a sore. And I didn’t think, and I didn’t want to, leaning in to rub it away with a finger. Teddy’s breath on the back of my hand.

I felt it like a buzz. A kiss. Her kiss. His. Both of theirs, fused into something that wasn’t meant to be touched by anyone at all. I was a stranger creeping into their home. I’d eavesdropped on their secret.

And I didn’t know what to blame now, all this closeness fogging me stupid, the eggnog, the Firewhiskey, Lily’s disgusting guitar strumming. Teddy leaned down. His eyes glowed, mouth cracked open.

The way the light hit him.

I wanted to remember this feeling forever.

 

 

**James (17)**

 

"Et voilà!" Aunt Fleur slammed the meat cleaver into the bone, theatrical, all the marrow gushing. I flinched when a piece pricked my cheek. Lily looked like she might cry.

"Lily, ma chérie, it’s - poof _."_ Aunt Fleur burst her fingers through the air. "Already dead."

"But still!" Lily flinched, eyes frantic as they stuck to the cleaver weighing down Fleur’s dainty hand. I rolled my eyes. Lily was being a complete muppet lately, forcing us to sit through slaughterhouse documentaries and chopping up Vegan Quibbler articles just to paste them all over the bathroom mirrors. ( _Eat Cacabulus Chomping Cabbage not Cattle_ in big blocky letters next to a picture of a bleeding calf.) Al was scared of eating his sausages in front of her because she’d get all loony. She threw a whole plate of them out the window once. Mum had a brain aneurysm.

I slinked towards the living room when Lily’s face started sprouting all that red, feeling a little guilty for leaving Aunt Fleur to waddle her handkerchief in front of Lily’s eyes trying to fan away impending tears.

The Burrow was emptier this year. Uncle Percy was stuck at the Ministry, and George and Ange were busy planning the reopening of the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, something Gran wasn’t too happy about, but they’d tried to make it up by sending a box of Demon Dung and Screaming Yo-yos (which didn’t go so well when Al yanked it open). But at least Mum had knit little hats and popped them onto Percy’s and George’s spoons on the clock. Gran had liked that.

Heads dangling, the rest of us were leaking into the sofas and chairs. It was weird for Christmas to be this quiet, quiet enough to make the ghoul in the attic start pounding on the pipes. Al had fallen asleep next to one of Gran’s self-knitting scarves. We hadn't even had dinner yet, and Dad and Uncle Bill were already slurring on their words.

And then Teddy.

I’d been trying not to look at him too much, stay out of orbit. Which was ridiculous when he was getting all gooey on that Firewhiskey, the leftover Daisyroot Draught, sending out smiles like the Christmas Miracle he was.

He hadn’t brought anyone this year. He looked different, hair tamed to a muted brown, a hardness to him that reminded me of his Head Boy days, all shoulders and Adam’s apple, put together, all firm certainty. Dad said Auror training could do that to you, turn you into something more shock-absorbent. He looked clogged, I thought. But the colour slipped the more he drank, the roots of his hair sparking blue-green. Like he was leaking, all that Teddy spilling over.

But then those smiles, the way I was sure they could power a whole town. I was glad there were some things he’d never be able to hide.

Victoire had been trailing after him all day, tipping her head back at anything he said, her laugh just like her mother’s, throttling through the air and making all the windows crack. She sat next to him by the fireplace, touched him now, scraped her pink nails across his scalp. And his face leaked red, throat bobbing. His big hands. Her tiny brain. Godfuck. I thought about sneaking a heap of George’s Demon Dung into her purse.

Maybe I hated her for looking at him like that, face unfurling like they did on those girls Teddy would pull at weddings or pubs (he’d taken me last year, Al and Louis and me, and the fucking sweetness of him when he sauntered - because he _sauntered_ \- to the girls chirping around the bar counters - _'What’s your name, love?' -_ and the way they’d whirl around, hit by that red pang of surprise, and that stupid mouth would soften into the stupidest smile, lopsided and balmy, and he got them, he always did, always, because it couldn’t go any other way).

Vic kept slithering closer, a big Sphynx kitten about to pour into his lap. _Wow, Teddy, tell me more. Sounds so dangerous, Teddy. You’re so strong, Teddy. Christ, Teddy. Oh, Teddy. Bend me over, Teddy._

I wanted to vomit onto her lap. _Bend me over, Teddy_ might as well be the slogan of my life.

He’d taken one look at me, dusting Floo Powder off his shoulders, complaining about how I wouldn’t stop growing. It made my chest puff up, made me feel ten trillion feet tall. Mum had told him about how she had to buy me new shoes every month. _'He’ll be towering over me, Edward.'_ Her hand ruffling through my hair. I’d shrugged her off. ' _You know what they say about big feet,'_ he’d said and winked.

I’d vaporized.

_Big feet._

I hadn't been able to keep my eyes off of Teddy's all night.

It wasn’t like I’d never seen _it_. All those summers spent in the cottage in Studland Bay, sharing the same rooms, the bunk beds. Teddy’s everything glistening with sweat and sunscreen, the red bite of a burn glowing across his shoulder blades. His fingers curling into the elastic of his swim trunks. And lying in bed at night, I’d wondered about the heat and the weight of something so bodily, something so private in your mouth, gliding against your tongue, down your throat until your eyes watered. My fingers in my mouth when my hands snaked under my boxers, staring up at the bunk bed, Teddy up there, breathing slowly. That little hitch in his throat when he was close to falling asleep.

 

◆

 

I was thankful everyone was pissed enough not to notice me sneak upstairs, Lily’s attempts at playing "A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love" chasing me all the way to our room. She hadn’t gotten any better. I was the only one who’d had the heart to tell her, but she thought I was a great heaping dragon bogey dildo whose opinion meant fuck-all. So there was that.

Leaning back against the door, I thought about charming it shut - before remembering I’d set the sofa on fire yesterday. Dad said doing magic with a wonky wrist was a death wish.

I manoeuvred my way across the minefield of sleeping bags, the heaps of dirty laundry. Louis had taken over the bed this Christmas, leaving Al and me sardined on the floor. Again. It was all those mind games. You couldn’t win against National Gobstones Champions. Half of them might be knob-less, but they always got the beds.

"Jamie?" A soft knock on the door. I swallowed, steering towards the bed and diving headfirst into the pillows. "Go away."

"You sure? I’d have to take all these macaroons with me then." The shuffle of Teddy’s heels on the floor.

I held my breath, pressed my fists against my temples. "Okay. Fine."

Teddy’s laughter tumbled into the room. Because he had that kind of laugh, that hysterical falling-over-itself laugh, a laugh that laughed, that big belly avalanche. I hated him for it. I hated him for a lot of things.

It died down the longer I kept my face mushed into the pillows, breathing in Louis’s disgusting Snargaluff cologne. I was sure it was making my nostrils bleed. "Do you actually have macaroons or was that just a ruse." All muffle. "Kind of," he said. I turned my head at that, the coolness of the room washing over me.

Teddy loomed above, balancing a plate of macaroons - and a mug of something so nasty it triple-twisted my stomach. Slamming my face back into the pillows, I moaned. "Over my dead body."

"Ginny said this is the last one, I promise." The clink of the plate on the bedside table. The mattress dipping. The weight of him. I wished my nose wasn’t bleeding so I could smell him.

I came back up for air, flapping my wonky wrist back and forth, biting the inside of my cheek when it stung. "It’s healed, see?"

Teddy raised a brow. "Knock it back, and it’s all yours." He slid the plate of macaroons on the bed for good measure. (Aunt Fleur might be secretly off her trolley, but she made the best macaroons in the universe.)

I pressed my cheek back into the pillow, staring at the leftover indent on the top of my wrist, like the tiniest piece was missing. Yesterday should’ve been my last dose of Skele-Gro, but I’d thrown up half of it over Mum’s lap. It burned a hole through her trousers.

And it was embarrassing enough to admit I’d shattered my wrist trying to pull off the Wronski Feint during a match, something Teddy used to be so good at he made my dad look like a toddler flying on a stick.

I remembered the first time I saw him do it. Pretending he’d spotted the snitch, Teddy had steered his broom towards the ground, straight as an arrow, a lightning strike. The other seeker soaring after him. And how the teachers shot up in the stands, wands flicked, everyone yelling, my heart pulsing in the back of my throat, my ears. But right before hitting the ground, right before blowing up every bone in his body, Teddy wrenched his broom back up and blasted into space, the other seeker caught in a tumble.

It was magic. It was better than magic. And I’d thought that if Teddy could do something better than magic, then maybe I could do it too. And maybe if I could do it better, Teddy would be so impressed he’d snog me stupid for it, in front of everyone, on a broom, naked and glistening and slathered in oil like those blokes in the old Squiddling’s Se-X-travaganza magazines I found under Louis’s mattress last Christmas. (Because he was a sicko too. Bless him.)

But Lily was right. I was a great heaping dragon bogey dildo. And great heaping dragon bogey dildos ended up with their wrists bent backwards. 

I wiped a hand across my face. Teddy shot me a smile, lopsided and balmy, and fuck, I wished I could eat something off it, eat something off the rest of him too. Aunt Fleur’s macaroons, Mum’s butterscotch, jelly slugs. Gouda.

I didn’t think twice before shuffling off the bed. I grabbed the mug of Skele-Gro and tossed it into the plant pot on the windowsill, the root shivering, a foul grey shooting up the stem before it sprouted new leaves. I felt sick just thinking about the nights at St. Mungo’s, drinking this stuff through a straw like it was pumpkin juice. 

Teddy lifted his hands up in defeat before handing me the plate of macaroons. I scooted across the bed before shoving them down my throat so fast I thought I might choke. I tried to hide the way my wrist shook every time I jerked it too hard. I didn’t like the way it made Teddy look at me, like he wanted to swaddle me in a blanket and spoon-feed me pre-chewed carrots. "Good?" he asked, crossing his legs. I nodded. "Bangin’." He laughed at that, and it made me feel bad enough to split the last macaroon and give him a piece.

"So your sister’s been trying to teach Gran the Sprinkler," he said, chewing, licking buttercream off his thumb. I looked away. "She taught me the Macarena last year," I said. "Muggle dance moves are weird."

"Trust me, if you started doing the Sprinkler in Muggle clubs, you’d get your arse kicked."

Of course Teddy went to Muggle clubs. He loved the Muggle world, Muggle movies, Muggle food, Muggle music, Muggle sports. He’d forced me to sit through a rerun of the whole World Cup with him this summer.

Aunt Fleur was right about the football tush.

"What do you have to do to not get your arse kicked." I cocked a brow.Teddy nudged his head to the side before quirking his shoulders up to the discordant beat of Lily’s guitar strumming, making shapes with his hands, boxes, circles. I grabbed a pillow and smashed it over his head. "Sod off…"

"I wish I was kidding." And Teddy’s avalanche laugh and the feeling in my stomach and the thought of us being in a room with a bed. "I’ll take you sometime," he said. "Show you what it’s really like."

My mouth dipped open as if I was going to say something, but I snapped it shut. Teddy’s eyes darted across my face. He cleared his throat, looked away.

It was quiet again, save for the distant pipe-banging coming from the attic. I felt myself cave in a little, staring at the soft slope of his nose, how tender it looked in a face so strong. I couldn’t help myself. "What happened to her?"

Something in Teddy’s face shifted, his eyes flicking down to the coloured crumbs on the plate. "Olivia?"

My eyebrows tensed. I’d forgotten her name. Lipstick. Olivia. I nodded. He shrugged. He used to do that a lot, but this was the first time I’d seen him do it all night.

Sighing, he placed the plate on the bedside table and stretched across the bed, joints popping, his long limbs crowding what little space we had left. He stared at the ceiling for a moment. His chest rose. I wanted to press my hand to it, feel it like an ebb and flow. Or get one of those stethoscopes, count the beats per minute, squash my face into the indent where the arch of his ribs met. Breathe in. Kiss him there.

Kiss…

I stared at his mouth, watched it flutter, stumbling, sifting through things to say, until it finally dipped. "Broke up with me," he said. I jerked my head back up. "Said I was -" He stopped, played with a loose thread sticking out of the hem of his sweater. "She said I had some stuff to figure out."

"Did you?"

He shrugged again. "I don’t know."

After another round of him fiddling with the thread, he grabbed his wand, wordlessly tapping it over the hem until everything looped itself back into place.

I liked his wand, dark and strong. Kingwood. I remembered the trouble he’d had with it in the beginning, when he didn’t even know how to keep his hair from changing colour, how to control his body. He’d be growing extra limbs, feathers, glowing in the dark, his face morphing into shapes that never fit, turning into people I’d never seen before. All those big bursts of magic. _'It’s like taming a bloody beast,'_ he’d yelled once. And I didn’t know if he’d meant his wand or himself.

I shifted and pulled my knees up to my chin. "So…Victoire…"

"Victoire?" Teddy looked up.

"Victoire."

He shook his head. "Victoire’s Victoire."

"What’s that supposed to mean."

"Just that -" Running a hand through his hair, colour sparking. "Victoire is Victoire."

"But…" I tried to look for something to say, and all I came up with was that I still wanted to shove Devil Dung into her purse. And vomit onto her lap. "Never mind."

Teddy sighed again. He smiled at me the way he used to when we were younger, that almost pitying ’Oh, Jamie’ smile. He started fiddling with the fixed hem of his sweater, but then he stopped, and his hand stuttered closer, and I felt it like the impending drop on that Wronski Feint, that pit-less feeling shooting all the way down to my toes. I sucked in a breath. And when he started patting my head, I wanted to lean into it the way I used to, rub my scalp into his warm palm until he laughed and called me a touch deprived poodle.

But this was a long lost routine. I wished I’d realized when we’d outgrown what we used to be together.

Teddy pulled his hand back, cleared his throat. "Hey, I meant it with the Muggle club." He sat up after another puff of silence. I lifted my chin from my knees and looked at him. "You’re graduating next year," he said, whispered it. He smiled. The warmest fucking thing. "There’s so much… Christ, Jamie, there’s so much I want to show you. I mean I live in Dunwell, but the next Portkey’s like five minutes away. And I know you hate them, but you’ll get used to it, I promise. We’ll practice. And London’s - Muggle London…it’s beautiful, Jamie. It’s really, really beautiful." It was so hard not to let him pull you in. Mouth hanging open, pouring. That leftover whiskey making him sloshy all over again.

For a moment, I could close my eyes. For a moment, he was before-Head-Boy Teddy, before-Auror Teddy, all loose and flushed and gushing. The Teddy we never got see anymore. The Teddy who used to trick people into looking straight into a Boxing Telescope, who set offBoggart Bangers in our neighbour’s postbox, who sneezed on purpose when he threw down his Floo Powder just to see if he’d accidentally land on Mars.

And he told me about all these things I had to see, all these perfect places, the charmed bouillabaisse in Leadenhall Market that you could taste all the way down in your fingers and toes and, "Like…your pork sword," he whispered, whooshing his fingers over his crotch, and I laughed so hard I tore my stomach wide open. "No. No, you don’t get to call it that."

"Baloney pony." And I laughed even harder, enough to make the ghoul bang on a pipe for good measure. And he told me about the secret pub beneath the Palm House in Kew Gardens, the Weird Sisters impersonators, with a lead singer who looked so much like Myron Wagtail you’d, ' _Shit your pants, Jamie.'_ God’s Own Junkyard in Walthamstow where they sold fairy-dust-powered neon signs, J. Pippin’s Potions, the ghost tavern in the Leake Street Tunnel where they taught you how to waltz if you bought enough maggoty haggis.

I didn’t know what half of those things meant, and I didn’t care because Teddy was talking so fast he was slurring, chewing around his words, and he leaned in so close I could hear his hair shift between colours. Brownblueredyellow. "Have you ever had Baklava?"

I shook my head. I loved the way he said it, the dark red of his tongue flashing between his teeth _._

_Bak-la-va._

I smiled. He smiled. And he was so beautiful I thought I might fade in the face of it.

"You should come visit," he said. "You could stay with me."

I pulled my knees tighter against my chest. "I don’t - "

"After graduation. It’s perfect. It’s perfect, James." _James_. I didn’t like when he called me that. But I liked it when he said it like this, like I was able, ready for the whole wide world. Ready for him. "I’ve got an office I barely use. And I’m barely ever home because of training. And the Portkey’s right there. You’d have all of London to yourself, all of Muggle London. All the Baklava in the world." His brows scrunched so hard he almost looked frantic.

I wondered if I looked the same. Desperate for something I couldn’t name, wanting it so much I didn’t know where the rest of me was. 

"James," he said.

_Anything for you. Everything._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> petition for james sirius potter to eat gouda off teddy's ass
> 
> [tumblr](https://the-tortellini-man.tumblr.com/)//[twitter](https://twitter.com/its_me_pastaboy)


	2. Chapter 2

**James (18)**

 

When Teddy said Dunwell was straight up the world’s rectum, I wasn’t prepared for the understatement of the century. Dunwell was too much of a blind spot to have a zip code, much less a place on a map. This wind-whipped seaside town full of shrivelled old witches and wizards who complained about the wind-whipping and then complained about the absence of it. And the Muggles here were all half-raisin and super sloshed. All the time. Even the Muggle dentist, or especially the Muggle dentist, and Teddy told me how his assistant had to stick a flag out the window when a patient came in, so he’d know when to hobble out of the pub down the road.

One church. One B&B. Sheeps littering the roads outback, that same fat fog rolling down the cobblestone every morning. A quietness here. Just the sound of the oyster luggers hitting the docks, the seagulls yelling against the wind. 

I didn’t understand why someone like Teddy would want to live in a place that smelled like sheep shit, so far away from anything it felt like we’d been tucked into the back of a cupboard for safekeeping. But Teddy said he liked the quiet, liked the clouds and the cold, the smell of the sea, liked the way everyone let each other be. _'I think my father would’ve loved it,'_ he’d said. ' _The ocean…_ ' Muffled into his pint at the pub on my first night here, face so flushed, folded into himself as he crawled back to a place I couldn’t follow.

You saw it everywhere, the sea, shreds of blue peeking through the ends of alleyways, the stained windows in the pubs, storefronts and cafés, always there, always deep and dark and roiling. And how all the buildings leaned towards it, tipping over so much you did too, veering without wanting to. You could see it from Teddy’s flat, a strip of blue-black glinting just above the caved-in roof of his neighbours. The closeness of everything and everyone. I could hear their tellies, the whirr of a sleep apnea machine at night.

But I liked Teddy’s flat, cramped and crooked - all leather, books, windowpanes - balanced over the home of an old witch who’d sold herbs down Knockturn Alley.

Birdie was really loud and really mean, and I was in love with her. Hair crackling like she was all bonfire, earrings jangling every time she moved, like a gipsy, a one-woman show, a stack of Taro cards forever tucked into the layers of her sweaters and scarves, those downy skirts. No matter the weather, she was always a big ball of angry yarn.

She’d handed me a plate of scones on my first day here. _'Eat. You look like a fucking string bean,'_ she’d said, or yelled, because she was half deaf, jabbing the plate into my chest so hard I’d coughed. And now she brought them over every Sunday, and we were best friends (over her dead body) and I was going to marry her (which she was weirdly okay with, but she said we’d have to do it soon because she was an old bat. _'Can’t wait to leave this wretched planet, Jared!'_ She still hadn’t gotten my name right.)

Teddy liked her too, liked that she was one of those witches who preferred the slowness of arcane magic, reading futures at the bottom of teacups, throwing ground tentacula over her shoulder to fend off fairies, that bite of spice trailing after her everywhere she went, pouches of lavender and mandrake dangling over her front door, salt poured across her window sills against uninvited guests.

She cleansed Teddy’s flat every month, electric blue smoke wafting off a smudge stick she’d swing through every room. Teddy let her be. He said she just liked having someone to take care of. And I liked that she liked it and liked that he let her.

Birdie had brought over another batch of scones this morning, full of fudge flies that buzzed in your mouth when you chewed. It punched a laugh out of us every time we caught each other’s cheeks bulging. A minute hadn’t gone by, and we’d already eaten half of them.

Teddy stumbled into his socks, still chewing, hair sticking up, the indent of his pillow tattooed into his cheek. I’d made him stay up late at the pub again, listening to the secret You-Know-Who stories of some old goblin with a beard so long he’d wrapped it around his head like he’d just come from the dentist. He said he didn’t like the way people looked at his ears. I told them they were super wicked.

I smiled into my coffee, watching Teddy fumble for his wand to tie his shoelaces. I was still getting used to it, being able to see him like this again, unmade Teddy, the Teddy bursting out of his bed in nothing but boxers, sleep drunk and slurring and blanket warm. The Teddy who was trying to quit smoking, always chewing on something now, a pen, his finger, chocolate wands (so much chocolate, stuffed into his coats, his jeans, a whole stash hidden in a drawer under his desk). The Teddy who drank his coffee with so much sugar it made your teeth rot, who scrunched his face when he shaved, who had to stroll around the flat while brushing his teeth, who practised wandless magic when he couldn’t sleep, lightbulbs exploding, cracks in the walls. He’d shattered all the windows once.

And he read Muggle books on the crumbling leather sofa - between trunks full of more barmy Muggle devices Grandad had smuggled out of the Ministry for his birthdays - had a phone for his Muggle friends and a car hidden in an abandoned barn nearby. No magic. He said he liked the feeling of something that worked all on its own, something puzzled-together by ideas and time and effort, all the cogs pumping, everything falling into place like the inside of a watch. _'I like the way it just…it works. It’s so big, and it bloody works,'_ he’d said, that same weird glow on him that reminded me of the first time Dad had let him fly on his old Firebolt.

He promised he’d take me for a ride. He promised he’d teach me how to drive. Mum would murder me, and I couldn’t bloody wait.

"You sure you don’t want me to take you anywhere?" Teddy asked. "Got time before class." He stuffed the last scone into his mouth, patting his trousers down to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

I shook my head. "Portkey’s fine." Teddy’s face did that droopy thing it did when he wanted to say something he knew you didn’t want to hear. But he shook his head, tucking his lips between his teeth for a moment before grabbing his wand.

I hated apparating. The last time I had to do it was when Al broke his leg after stumbling over a gnome hole (because he was daft) and Mum and I had to get to St. Mungo’s the fastest way possible. But instead of taking care of Al, she’d had to hold my hair back while I’d spillt my guts on the linoleum floors.

I didn’t know if it was the feeling of it, like using a Portkey on crack, like you were being blasted through a pinhole. Or maybe it was the thought that in that mad in-between, you were pulled so impossibly wide all your parts jumbled up, brain in feet, heart in stomach, each wing of your lungs tucked into ten fingers at once.

' _The three D’s!_ ' Mrs Higgs had said during our first class, shooting me a glare when I’d started laughing. ’ _Destination, determination, deliberation._ ' And I froze on all three. Because I was a great heaping dragon bogey dildo. _'Too much going on in that thick skull of yours,'_ she said, smacking her wand across my forehead so hard I had to walk around with a red line on me for days. And I remembered the way Dad looked at me, Harry fucking Potter, the Legend himself, the God, and his son was too much of a nitwit to snap from one place to another. Maybe that was why we were so relieved we had Teddy. Teddy who never had to try. Teddy with a shadow big enough to hide behind. 

Leaning towards me, Teddy’s hand twitched like he wanted to reach out and ruffle my hair, brows tensed, that quiet slouch to his mouth. But he stopped, chewed on his lip before stepping back. He smiled, once and quickly, but before I could manage one too, he flicked his wand. Snapping into himself, sucked away with a slurp.

I stared at the empty spot where he’d disappeared, padded closer to stand on it. I imagined the wood was warm.

It was bad enough when Teddy was around, but it was worse when he wasn’t. I’d press my face into his used towels drying by the shower curtains, stare at the stash of chocolates in his desk, thinking how much of it I could eat before he charmed them. Everything smelled like him, looked like him, and I smoothed my hand over the soft indent in the sofa where he lied when he read a book. I curled into it, nuzzled my nose into the flakey leather, imagining I could smell him, imagining I was lying on his chest. And he was breathing. And I couldn’t get myself to. 

I didn’t notice I’d fallen asleep until I felt the soft weight of a blanket over me, the sound of Teddy’s shoes clacking on the hardwood floor.

And then that dream, the far-away linger of a big veiny hand in my hair.

 

◆

 

He wasn’t home for the two weeks that followed. Another big Auror test, and they were all out there somewhere, Egypt, the moon, getting ready to fight the good fight, I thought. 

He’d ruffled my hair before he’d left, proper ruffled, and even though it was just as awful as the last time, I didn’t miss the way it used to feel, didn’t miss a time where I never thought it felt like anything at all. 

It had been easier at Hogwarts. Away from him. But here, he was still there when he wasn’t, traces of him sprinkled across the fuzzy rugs, the kitchen counters and bathroom cupboards, his shampoo glaring at me in the rusty basket in the shower. The way I’d touch his things and close my eyes, hope somehow, impossibly, I’d drink up all of his secrets.

I slept in his bed now, wore his pyjama bottoms, two sizes too big and sliding down my hips so much I had to hold them up when I walked. His coats and scarves. His sweaters.Sometimes I’d wear all of it at once, lie in his bed, soak in the smell of him until I was swollen with it. I’d even tried to fight my way through the Muggle book he’d been reading lately, but Franz Kafka was just as mad as Birdie on a good day.

She’d been keeping me company, dragging me through London and showing me all the things Hogwarts had been too scared to teach us in herbology. Like last night when she’d brought me to the woods to gather venomous tentacula, and we’d ended up disturbing a pixie nest instead. My scalp still ached from when a horde of them yanked me into a tree by my hair. But because Birdie was proper mad, she caught one. She named him Gus.

Gus was a fucking nightmare.

"He’ll kill you in your sleep," I said, watching him gnaw at the rusty metal of the birdcage she’d locked him in, triple-charmed to keep his strength in check. At least he’d stopped throwing his poo at us.

His wings stuttered, his skin blasting blue in the late afternoon sun. It was weirdly warm for Dunwell, and Dunwell didn’t know how to deal with nice things, everyone left confused and complaining. But at least Birdie wanted us to do it on her tiny balcony, soaking in the sun. Half the sky barely in view with all her plants curled over us, sugar shrubs and bouncing bulbs, her big flesh-eating flowers lurching at the passersby on the road below.

Birdie gave Gus’s cage a little kick when she bumped her knee against the table, our teacups clanking. The pixie tumbled. Birdie’s laugh like a mountain troll’s, and it was loud and ugly, and it made you shit your pants but also laugh right back.

"Not if I kill him first," she said, lighting her third pipe today. I picked up a sugar cube from my saucer and wedged it between the bars of the cage. Gus snatched it, giving it a few licks before trying to stuff the whole thing into his mouth. I smiled. It reminded me of Teddy and Birdie’s scones, the way he knew his mouth was too small but tried to shove them in anyway, that stupid boyish act of defiance.

I lifted my legs and tucked my knees against my chest, fumbled with my teaspoon. "How do you think he’s doing?"

Birdie puffed on her pipe. Her eyes wandered down the side of my face, my throat, the collar of Teddy’s shirt I’d been wearing for the third day in a row.

Reaching out to flatten the wrinkles, she scratched away a stain with her long nails. "He’ll be fine," she said, falling back into her chair, a harshness there that I knew she didn’t mean. But she softened then, just the littlest bit, the way her shoulders fell, chin tilted down, and her hair dimming. "It’s good you’re here, Jack," she said, quiet this time. I didn’t know Birdie could be quiet at all, so quiet she didn’t even sound angry anymore. I was sure she couldn’t hear herself, like it was nothing but a thought in her head. And that made me warm all over. And I imagined she only said it like that for me.

"Boy doesn’t have it easy." 

I put the spoon back down. "Teddy?" She nodded, chewed on her pipe, looked away.

It was weird getting to know the Teddy Birdie knew. Sometimes when she talked about him, I didn’t recognise him, couldn’t find him in the person she cared for so much it made me feel guilty. Because maybe I’d missed something, or maybe I’d never bothered enough to look. Teddy who soared through things, always exceeding expectations along the way: Captain of the Quidditch team, Head Boy, Auror in training. 

It used to hurt. Until watching him smile at someone else hurt more. Until seeing Birdie’s face like this made me worry.

No one ever worried about Teddy.

 

◆

 

When Birdie dragged me out to London, it had less to do with spending time with her uber fit husband-to-be and more to do with using said uber fit husband-to-be as her personal mule. She pulled me all the way down Diagon Alley, through potion shops and pubs, yelling her way through the crowd and warding off anyone who wanted to buy Gus (because she brought Gus everywhere now, and he was in love with her, and I didn’t blame him).

"Chop fucking chop, Jeremy," she shouted at me from the inside of a flower shop, the woman behind the counter lurching at all her squawking. I groaned, stumbling towards her, lugging baskets and trunks, thinking I’d be folded in half like an accordion for the rest of my life. I’d have to cook like this and clean (which I couldn’t do un-accordioned either), sleep, go to the bathroom. I was too short now to reach the toilet bowl.

I’d gotten halfway into the shop, trying to yank the trunk up the flight of stairs when Birdie hobbled towards me, grabbing my arm. "One more stop."

"But I -"

"Hold your breath." And we blasted off, bodies stretched so far all my joints popped back into place, de-accordioned, brain in feet, heart in stomach, each wing of my lungs tucked into ten fingers at once. And just before my gut squeezed closed so tight I was sure I’d vomit right into the swirling gorge of space and time itself -it stopped.

Trunks toppling over. A basket full of glass jars slamming down on my toes. "Jesus _fuck!_ " I grabbed my foot. "Why do you always have to -"

That mountain troll laugh. "I like the way you squeal, kiddo. " Pinching my cheek so hard she punched one right out of me. I swatted her off, trying to ease the throb in my foot. "Sod off…"

Gus giggled in his cage. I flipped him off.

It was late by now, the sky here clear and warm. I blinked, watching the breeze tug at the trees scattered throughout the maze of stones ahead, weeping angels on pedestals, Mausoleums peeking through the forest outback. A graveyard. The air sweet and heavy form all the bouquets spread across plots.

Flowers and Gus’s cage in hand, Birdie lifted her gazillion skirts and coats, wadding through the soft grass in her rain boots. It was 25 degrees and no cloud in sight. But Birdie was always shivering, and I couldn’t believe someone with hair like that could be cold at all.

"Leave the stuff," she yelled. I stumbled after her, down a path winding through the trees. We stopped by the biggest one, a massive old willow, its hairy head curled over the plots beneath it. A whole family of them. All with the same last names except for one.

_Remus Lupin._

Something in me stuttered when my eyes flicked back to the grave next to it, so close the stones almost touched, leaning towards each other as if reaching out.

 _Nymphadora Tonks_.

"This is - " I stopped, swallowed.

Birdie didn’t look at me when she jammed Gus’s cage against my chest, the pixie whining, his tiny hands reaching for her through the bars. She got onto her knees, groaning as she swapped the fresh bouquet of flowers for the old one withering between the two gravestones. "They have to be changed every week," she said. And she was quiet again. Nothing but thought. "Doesn’t have the time now, does he."

I stared down at the plots, the stones rough and shining in the shreds of leftover sun. I didn’t want to move too much, breathe too hard like I might shake something awake. Something deep down there, dormant, dreaming. 

Birdie pressed a gnarled palm into the grass, closing her eyes like she was feeling for something, waiting for an answer to a question she’d never get. Her eyes were still closed when she spoke. "He does something for me." Gruff but hushed. "I do something for him."

"What does he do for you?" I was whispering too. But she didn’t answer.

She got back up on her feet, patting dirt off her skirts before yanking Gus’s cage out of my grip and dragging it along with her. He screeched a moment, loud and piercing, his tiny hands scrambling to hold onto the bars.

A breeze brushed down my front, the willow tree shivering. I stared at the names on the stone, carved each letter with my eyes until I felt them blaze.

Teddy never told me he came here every week. And I felt so stupid for wondering, because of course he did, of course he had to. Because it was them.

My chest shrunk the more I thought of it, that they were down there, beneath me, the people who’d loved him more than I ever would.

I imagined he was here, standing where I was standing, and I thought about the things he thought, tried to find and feel those mighty fucking feelings. And I thought about my dad, drunk on whatever he was allowed to get away with on Christmas, watching Teddy light up a whole room with his stories, using his metamorphmagus to warp his voice as easy as breathing, and the way Dad would lean in close, wafts of warm whiskey, whispering into my ear how much he looked like Remus, all that Tonks blazing when he opened his mouth, the force of him. And then how he always had a chocolate bar hidden in his coat. That sad soft look on Dad’s face, the one that made him look really young and really old, really close, really far away, remembering a time I couldn’t possibly. _'It slipped one day, you know? Remus…and the chocolates. Next thing I know Ed has a whole bag of them in his room.'_

I stared at a clump of moss growing in the 'P’ of Nymphadora. And I wondered what it felt like to love someone through other people, puzzling them together through stories and middlemen, to never really know, to be left wondering and wishing and dreaming, to hope the ideas you had might just impossibly be enough. To be left loving empty-handed because you’d never been given a chance.

I thought of Teddy walking through the world with half of him missing. And I thought of a different Teddy, on a different Earth, in a different Milky Way of a different universe, and that Teddy was whole, and I wondered just how different that Teddy was from the one I knew. If he was different at all. If it mattered. And the more I told myself it didn’t, the more it did. 

I wiped a hand across my face. I looked back, Birdie’s crooked bulk of body hunkering down the narrow path.

_'Boy doesn’t have it easy.’_

And he'd worked so hard to make you think he did.

 

◆

 

"I passed!" Teddy’s Lumos smile hit me square in the face.

It was in the middle of the night, and I was barely awake, and there he was, looming over my bed like a mirage, rain pearling off his coat to splash me awake. I wondered where he’d come from, because it hadn’t rained in Dunwell for days. Did it rain on the moon?

I was ready to ask, but he grabbed me and yanked me out of bed. Whirling me through the air so fast I was dizzy from it, dizzy from the way his laugh screwed itself into my ears, dizzy from the closeness, his rain-drenched coat soaking into my clothes. "Did you miss me?" he said, face so close if it was light enough, I was sure I’d be able to count his eyelashes. My hands gripped into his shoulders, all that warm firmness, and I couldn’t imagine myself letting go, not for the fucking life of me. He was here, all of him, finally, his smile running me over, crushing me under the weight of it. I opened my mouth. I wanted to open my head for him too, let him know how much I’d needed him back.

But he dropped me on the bed and rushed into his room before I could answer. "We’re celebrating," he yelled.

I blinked, trying to reel my thoughts back in, gather everything I wasn’t allowed to scream at the top of my lungs. Because I wanted to stumble into his room and pat my hands across his body, make sure he was okay, wedge his face between my hands to see if everything was still in place, the freckles splattered across the edge of his cheeks, the scar down his jaw from a wild bludger, dimples big enough you could get your fingers stuck. Because he’d been gone for two centuries, and I was as old and shrivelled as the raisin Muggles of Dunwell, and I’d grown a beard so long I tumbled over it when I rushed into his room.

Teddy was in the middle of changing shirts when his attention strained on my stomach. He froze. I looked down at myself, frowning when I found nothing but a hole in my boxers.

"Is that my sweater?"

 

◆

 

Lying about not having done my laundry for two weeks would’ve been a fantastic explanation for why I was wearing his things - if it didn’t force him to lend me more of them (which I wasn’t going to complain about, except everything was still two sizes too big and too long, and Teddy had the longest arms and the longest legs and the longest…everything else), and when he tried to get me into the first club, the guy at the door wouldn’t let me in. Which made me want to chew his head off. Which made Teddy apologise three times to three different people for the toddler in the hand-me-downs making the biggest ruckus of his life.

"Call me a kid one more time, and I’ll pull your cock through your fucking eyeball!"

"Hey, come on, no more." Teddy’s hand crunched into my shoulder as he steered me back outside before the bouncer squashed me with a fist. Or sat on me. "Pisskidney," I yelled over my shoulder.

"Jamie, shut it." And I wished I had enough time to bask in the tiny smile I caught in the corner of his mouth - but the bouncer stomped out of the club, looming over us at a whopping ten billion feet. "What did you say to me, you little git?" I punched out a laugh. Teddy ripped me down the rest of the road by my sleeve, twisting us through the pub-crawl crowd pouring down the streets. The banging steps of the bouncer. My breath stuck in my throat when Teddy yanked me into the nearest alley. He bit down a laugh, pressed me into the cool wall. I didn’t bother to keep a lookout.

The streetlights sparked through his hair, face lit up by nothing but a smile. That fucking smile. My heart dropped all the way down to my feet. The two of us breathing heavy, choking on it in tandem. His hand was still crunched into my shoulder. I wanted to think he was holding on, that he needed me there, close enough not to misbehave.

Fuck, I’d missed him.

"Guess we’ll have to go see the Weird Sisters, then." He smiled down at me. I blasted a laugh. I imagined he caught it between his teeth like a bullet. "Watching rock star impersonators with a Metamorphmagus sounds like a waste of money," I said. 

Teddy’s smile shrunk, impish and stinging. "Good thing I know how to sneak in."

He took my hand. I think I died. 

 

◆

 

The Dragon Den was in the basement of an abandoned church. A little tacky and a little weird and just enough of it all for me to never want to leave. I whipped my head back, staring at the charmed ceiling, a kaleidoscope of stained glass, angels and demons and gods raging a war in a sky full of colour. My hand still hooked into Teddy’s when he pulled me through the crowd. Witches with tattoos flaring in the dark, shirt sleeves rolled up, dresses blazing, heels digging into my toes, everyone smoke-shrouded and sweating and glazed over with sound. I wanted to let them suck me in, hurl myself right into the sticky pit of it.

Teddy pulled me towards the bar where goblins slathered in makeup and wigs like pastries slid drinks across the counters. And when one of them asked Teddy what he’d like, I wedged myself between them, yelling, "Everything you have!"

Teddy’s laugh tumbled into my hair. I imagined myself shaking it out later. "This isn’t Honeydukes." He spoke into my ear, close enough his voice spiralled down the shell like a marble. I spun around, had to tip my head back to look at him. My forehead knocked against his chin. I cocked a brow. "Thought we were celebrating." Those eyes sparked, softened. He shook his head before mushing a hand into my face to push me aside. "Right, yeah, everything you have," he said. I smiled into his palm. I wanted to eat it.

 _Everything you have_ sounded like the best idea in the whole bloody world.

It didn’t take long for us to end up sprawled across the bar counter, chugging down buckets of Pear Dazzle, Dragon Scale, brandy that made your tongue catch fire. And by the time Teddy slid a glass of Gigglewater my way, a horde of angels had crowded above our heads, curious, gleaming down. Teddy smiled. I swore he'd swallowed the sun for breakfast.

Half-way down the glass, I was toppling over from laughing so much. I couldn’t breathe. My chest flared. And Teddy’s jaw unhinged, hanging loose, laughing until his eyes leaked. I heard it everywhere, heard it in everything, and I was sure they’d have to scrub it off the walls in the morning. I inched closer, holding my own belly to feel it shake. I didn’t want to miss a single sound. I wanted to open my mouth, wanted to let him empty his laughter into every inch of me.

"London, are you ready for some real music!" A big tremendous boom. The whole crowd blew up, a cluster of girls nearby warbling, ruffling their feathers. All the angels above, the demons and gods, jerking their heads and soaring towards the stage.

Teddy’s face erupted. His eyes. Torches. Beacons. Polychromatic. I took his hand this time, closed my eyes at the weight of it before pulling him off his stool and diving into the crowd. Everyone crashing forward. Hands brawling through the air. "Bloody hell, he looks nothing like him!" I yelled, staring up at the Myron Wagtail impersonator, clapping his hands above his head, his gut jiggling beneath his black feather vest. "Looks like a fit Filch." And that made Teddy laugh so hard I thought he might throw up. 

This was awful, deafening. This was everything. And I was dancing like my life depended on this. And Teddy’s. Because I swore it had to. Because he was doing the Sprinkler and the Macarena, loose-limbed and terrible. Because he was a wreck, and I wanted to dig my hands into his collar and rip him right into me. We were spinning now, tumbling into each other, hands bumping, flying, bursting apart. My hair caught in the corner of his mouth. His feet gnashing my toes every time he swung closer. And his hair. All that out-of-control fantastic blue. His mouth sloshing from laughter to smiles to words I couldn’t hear, his lips wet, pulsing. I wanted to stick my tongue into his dimples.

The crowd trembled when Fit Filch Myron yelled the first lines of "Do the Hippogriff", and I was pissed out of mind, head-banging every thought right out of my skull, head-banging my head right off. Body crushing into Teddy, his hands - his big, big shoulder-crunching hands - gripping into me. I wished I could see him, but my head was out there somewhere being kicked around like a loose quaffle. If I opened my mouth now, if I let anything slip, Teddy wouldn’t hear a word. I could say everything, anything at all. I could tell him.

He’d never have to know…never have to know that I thought about the sweltering days in the cottage down Studland Bay, thought about his sunburnt shoulders, his damp swim trunks drying on the edge of the bathtub, that I ached so much for things I didn’t know how to ask for I bit into my pillow at night. He’d never have to know how much it bothered me that I didn’t look anything like an Olivia, that I didn’t have a mouth that pulsed every time I spoke, that I was all jagged corners and skinny limbs and noise and stupid, so much, so much stupid.

And I thought about the way Birdie’s face caved in when she worried about him, thought about the graves under the willow tree, thought about all that big, big tremendous love, that whole sky’s worth of it stuck somewhere under the ground. And I thought about how I’d never be able to gather that much, to hold it in me for him, how it would blast me apart if I ever did. But I wanted to try for him. For him, I’d do anything. Everything.

_I’d do fucking everything._

And maybe somewhere out there on the soiled dance floor, my cheek pressed into a puddle of spilt Peach Dazzle, brain humming, heart too - maybe I told him. And maybe he heard.

Teddy’s hand on my shoulder.

The night in my mouth.

"Wheel around and around and around and around and around and around," Fit Filch Myron crooned. And I crooned too, wheeling, jiggling around until my head whiplashed into place.

Teddy’s hair stuck to his forehead, wild-eyed, leftover Gigglewater caught in the corners of his grin. He couldn’t keep himself upright. I couldn’t find my feet. And all this sound hitting me from every side at once, bawling up in the middle of my head, ribboned tight. I couldn’t stop blinking, eyelids heavy as the world swam in and out of focus. It was the easiest thing to slip away. World wallowing. Hazy. Teddy’s hand gripping into my shoulders when I started to tumble. The feeling of being lifted into the air, gathered into arms. Head lolling back and forth like a pendulum.

Black.

A snap.

Brain in feet, heart in stomach, each wing of my lungs tucked into ten fingers at once. Teddy’s heat, feeling him in all this time and space and infinite nothing. Holding on. Letting go.

Black again.

I floundered through Teddy’s flat, babbling, singing maybe. Dizzy. So bloody dizzy. I had legs for arms, arms for legs, and my head was on backwards. And my brain. I’d lost my brain. It was too hot, too cold. And I couldn’t breathe in these clothes. The sleeves too long, trousers dragging across the floor.

I couldn’t get them off fast enough, early morning air streaming in through the leaky windows, lapping down my skin.

"Come on, you’re hammered." And in all this quiet I could tell he was slurring. His hands on my shoulders to keep me steady. My naked skin. I crumbled. "You, too." I swallowed. "M’fine…" I heard myself say it, thoughts two steps behind my mouth. Teddy laughed. But it sounded like his mouth was full of water.

I whirled around, reached for him in the dark. My forehead knocked into his chest. I giggled. I didn’t giggle. We were wobbling through the flat, bumping from wall to wall, crashing into the living room couch when I staggered too far.

Closing my eyes. Teddy straddled beneath me.

Opening them. Teddy’s throat where my mouth was.

Sweat and cologne. A thickness. The drinks in my stomach roiling all the way down. I was oozing, runny, my skin sliding off to leave me throbbing.

I felt like I was skipping through time, missing the way one moment morphed into another, bundles of minutes disappearing. Because the next thing I knew, I was rocking against him, my hands gripping into his arms, his shoulders, mouth throbbing against the side of his neck. Because it fit there. Because I did.

I was saying things, the wet pressure of words on my tongue. But my ears were blocked, stuffed full with Fit Filch Myron’s leftovers, Teddy’s laugh high on Gigglewater. His throat tensed, bobbing up and down, like he was saying something. I wanted his hands on me, in me, everywhere he could reach, anything he could touch. I wanted him to have all of it. All of me. I wanted him. Wanted to tear into him, hook myself into the very centre and never climb back out. 

"Jamie." My hands everywhere. "Jamie." His hands nowhere at all. "Come on…" His rumble of a voice fighting through the fog. I heard him from far, far away. Miles and years. We were lifetimes apart. "Jamie - " I came up for air. His face in the dark, hazy, eyes so faded I thought he might fall over and never wake up.

"Please." I didn’t sound like myself. And the jab of pain that came with not recognising it. _I don’t ever want to stop._ I wished I could say it. I wished I could do more than just breathe too hard…want too much.

Teddy’s hand came up - and I wanted to cry from relief, slam my hands against my chest, because finally, fucking finally, finally - closing in on my face, his fingers on my jaw, my bottom lip. Swollen. I was smudged all over. I was a disaster.

"James…" _James._

I swallowed so hard my heart tumbled into my gut.

_Yes. Yes. Anything you want. Everything._

I opened my mouth for him the way I’d wanted to countless times before, grabbed his wrist, slid his fingers into my mouth. My tongue there.

 _Everything_ , I kept thinking and thinking I swore I was saying it out loud.

But looking at him like this - face twisted, like I’d wrapped my hands around his throat, like I’d cracked him wide open, like I was hurting him when all I wanted to do was soothe - I didn’t think this could be it. How could anyone want it like this.

Teddy’s eyes glazed over, mouth slammed shut. His hands were shaking. Or maybe those were my hands. Both of ours. Shaking until the whole world shook too.

"I’m sorry."

I didn’t know who said it first.

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK. SO. when i called this chill i meant chest shredder fest
> 
> [tumblr](https://the-tortellini-man.tumblr.com/)//[twitter](https://twitter.com/its_me_pastaboy)


	3. Chapter 3

I used to have this dream as a kid. Me and a road and a cryptic something. Me running and running towards that something, a question panting after an answer. That answer running and running away until I was screaming for it. I never got anywhere in those dreams, stuck in place, treadmill-shackled, but that insatiable yearning hooked into my chest, tearing at me so hard I felt like I was soaring, but I wasn’t, because I couldn’t. But it mattered, and it mattered so much I’d jerk myself awake at night, hurling out of bed until I was sputtering across the floor. Mum would crash into my room, her night robe trembling like those giant Atlas moths Uncle Bill used to bring back from Borneo, her face hovering over me, the softness of her hand brushing my cheek, the softness of her everything. ' _It was just a dream, love._ ' Palm to my forehead.

_Just a dream…_

_I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

_Not a dream…_

I blinked, groaned. Something was dying in my head. I tried to focus on the water stain rippled across the ceiling. Everything spun. My mouth sore, teeth so gooey I was afraid they’d slide right out of my gums. I lurched forward. Hand on my stomach. I felt sick. Rolling off the sofa, tumbling, scrambling, bumping into walls and shelves, the clank of things hitting the floor as I tried to make my way to the bathroom. 

The flash of white tiles. My head over the toilet bowl. Nothing came out. I jammed a hand into my stomach. "Fuck." Crumpling back, I looked down at myself. I was wearing nothing but boxers. I was cold. I was stupid. This was stupid. Because it was coming back in big blows to my head. He was. His dancing and dancing, all hands and legs and eyes. Him and his phosphorescent fish hair, and his smiles and his Gigglewater laugh, and then the absence of it. The static instead, and his voice, all that strangeness, far-flung, and the way he looked so sunken into.

I touched him and he was pitted.

Pressing myself up, wobbling, legs boneless, I swore my heart was everywhere, beating in every inch of me like I was all organ. And I stumbled to the sink, tried to shake myself out of it with a splash of water, yanked the bathroom cupboard open and gargled something that looked like mouthwash. Dizzy every time I closed my eyes. I gripped into the edge of the sink.

And just when I’d gathered enough energy to make myself look in the mirror, the thud of footsteps yanked me back. I felt it like a chest-flare, listening to the lazy drag of feet stop in front of the bathroom door. I should’ve said something then, _Stop, it’s me, and I’m dying_ , _and you’re probably not, because you’re Teddy, and the Teddys of the world don’t die from Pear Dazzle, because it’s Pear Dazzle, and I'm a bellend,_ but I was still two steps behind myself, still had arms for legs and legs for arms, and I leaned towards the door ready to press myself against it when it jerked open.

Teddy jumped, coughing on a breath with his hand on his chest. "Christ, you scared me." He still sounded drunk. He looked like a car crash. And I was glad about it until I felt awful for being glad about something so awful. Plus, at least he had all of his clothes on. I was the half-naked weirdo with morning wood. And I bet stripping had seemed like a fantastic idea when I was high off my arse on life and _Pear Dazzle_ , but I was cold now, and he was staring, and I wished I had twenty more hands to cover up. (Ten for my crotch because I was delusional.)

"Sorry…" I said and it was nothing but a wheeze. I closed my mouth, opened it, closed it, opened it again like I wasn’t tearing my head open trying to figure out what to say next. What came next? What did you say after yesterday? Or maybe it was today, too late and too early at once.

Teddy gripped into his faded T-shirt, the veins there, pulsing, blue and thick. I still felt it on my mouth, his thumb, the taste of skin I couldn’t even etch off with mouthwash.

The sound I’d made when he’d wrapped his hands around me to lift me off of him. The look on his face when he’d walked away.

And maybe that was worse than watching him kiss a girl at the top of a staircase, worse than catching him smile down at her. Watching Teddy walk away was feeling the world bend back beneath your feet to guzzle you down.

I swallowed, wanted to pound my fists into my stomach, tip my head back and scream until the ceiling popped into the sky. Because I still heard us -  _'I'm sorry.' -_  still felt him there, pressed against my legs. All that awful nagging heat. The shame of it now. The ugliness of all those things that meant something and meant something so desperately until the morning after.

Teddy padded closer, shoulders slouched. And everything in his face drooping, falling so quickly I felt like stumbling towards him to catch it.

"I didn’t -" Teddy rubbed his hands into his eyes. He inhaled. I caught myself inhaling too. "I didn’t want it to happen like that. I’m just, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Because I - "

"How did you want it to happen?" I imagined I was looking at him like he’d given me the sky.

And in all that body haze, his eyes were clear, blue and loud and on me. He stopped, bit his lip. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted so much. And I felt sick because I was still dying, and there was no more space for me to want so much. And the world was turning, and my legs. I didn’t know where my legs were. But then my mouth was opening and closing again, flaring like a bloody plimpy, because nothing worked the way I wanted it to, and nothing would ever come out right.

I said it again, as loud as I could. "How did you want it to happen?"

Teddy barked a laugh, ugly and not meant to be one. It was the worst time to laugh. But he had me pavloved.

Edward Remus Lupin laughed. I disappeared.

He shook his head, and then he nodded, and he was stuck in this weird in-between, head lolling back and forth like he couldn’t keep it upright. His hair fell into his face. I took it all back from before, because even like this, even sleep-deprived and hungover and awful, even as mangled as a car crash, he still looked so sweet I wanted to stuff him in my mouth.

I looked at the floor, thinking if I looked at him any longer I’d have heart murmurs. "I didn’t want it to happen like that either," I said. And there was more, and I let it punch out of me with my eyes closed. "I think about you."

 _I think about you so much I swear there’s no space for anything else. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing, because it doesn’t feel like it sometimes. Sometimes it’s awful, you’re awful, but you’re there, you’re always there, and I can’t get rid of you. And I hate myself for wanting to and then hate myself just as much for not wanting to. And I wouldn’t have it any other way - except I would_. _After last night. I would. Because I’m never sure. Because I think about you, think and think and think about you, and I’ve been so fucking sick of thinking about whether you think about me too._

I felt the whiplash of it, felt like I’d hurtled to the moon and back, and now I was here, and he was looking at me, but not really, past me, through me. I wanted to throw up again. I wanted to slam the door in his face and dunk my head into the toilet.

Holding my breath, I watched the bathroom tiles jumble up in my vision until they looked like teeth. I couldn’t look at him. He’d see everything I’d been trying to burry at the bottom, in the back of myself.

I wedged my lips between my teeth, imagining him going so soft, like when I did something stupid and saved it with an apology. Like I couldn’t possibly know what I was apologising for or what I’d done wrong.

"James." _James_.

I panicked. I could feel it all over like a crawling. I wanted to yank my skin off, needed an out, and I shouldered my way past him, back into the living room where I could rip the sofa open and sew it shut with me inside.

"Wait - " Teddy stumbled after me. I fell into the sofa, half sitting, half sprawled, because nothing in my body worked the way I wanted it to. Especially my mouth. My stupid cockwaffle of a mouth.

_I think about you._

I grabbed the blanket and dunked it over my head.

Teddy shuffled closer. I felt the warmth of him, felt the prickle of closeness like a piece of hair in my face. But then the pressure of hands on the blanket, grabbing my head, palms against my cheeks, the heat of him through all the itchy material. Opening my eyes, he was nothing but a blur through the mesh, like a ghost, like a memory, and I felt him lean in close, felt him like I was a tucked-back nerve.

I jerked at a weight of something on the top of my head. His mouth maybe. Or his cheek. Or maybe he’d just plonked our heads together because he was still 80 per cent Gigglewater and liquors unknown. But I felt it like a blooming, like something in me was opening, and all of these things pouring out. 

I breathed until the air was hot and used-up, and I stayed still, and he did too. His hands cradling my head. And it was this feeling, this big ballooning feeling, and the heat of him, and the mess of me, and he was beautiful, and I was all heart.

_I think about you._

 

◆

 

I sprawled across the table in Birdie’s kitchen, watching her mush together some barmy potion that would suck the soul back into my body.

"Looks like you two had fun," she said. I wanted to vomit. "Invite me next time. Couldn’t sleep with Gus being a fud."

"Sorry," I said. I still couldn’t speak right. Anything longer than a sentence made my brain hum. But I didn’t think Birdie minded. She said I was ten times more bearable when I kept my mouth shut. 

Yanking the loose collar of my jumper over my head, I pressed my cheek to the table. The smell of damp wood and earth and wax. I listened to Gus bounce against the ceiling beams. He was hovering around the herbs drying there, gnawing at the ropes to let them fall to the ground.

Birdie had tried to set him free a few times already,bringing him back to the woods at night, but he always ended up hiding in her cupboard the next day. She let him be now, let him bounce through her home and smear his poo across the chairs, cackling when we forgot to check and sat on them. But other than the poo-smearing and some late night tea-saucer-smashing, he was doing weirdly okay. Birdie was kind of nice to him, and he was kind of nice back. She said, in the end, ' _Every jobby-flavoured fart lozenge just needs a little loving_.' (I had to ask Teddy what she meant because sometimes Birdie let her Scottish slip until all I heard was bagpipes.)

I rubbed my face when it started to tingle again. And then that spot on the top of my head, the one Teddy had touched or kissed or banged his forehead against. And he'd touched me a gazillion times before, lied flat on top of me when we’d crashed into each other during a Quidditch match gone haywire, squished my cheeks, pinched my stomach in fourth year when I’d gotten chubby from all the Honeydukes - but this morning was different, because it had to be, because that spot on the top of my head was holy ground, and I wasn’t going to wash it until the day I died. 

I pressed my hand to it, imagined my skull was like a baby’s, like when Molly was born, and her head was all squishy and warm at the top because it hadn’t closed yet, her brain there, beating beneath a layer of skin. That tender spectacular hole. And I kept telling Percy to make her a helmet so she’d be safe, because people were dumb and dumb things happened all the time, and sometimes Muggle stuff fell out of the sky, satellites, space trash. You never knew. But Percy thought I was being ridiculous (he thought everything was ridiculous, baby helmets, pizza scissors, Americans, Gran's hovering pots and pans because they always bumped against his head), but Al and I ended up making one out of cardboard. Molly looked like she had a bludger for a head.

I pressed my forehead against the table, folded my hands over my head, that holy spot. I thought about making a helmet. Two helmets. Maybe I should walk around with a tin umbrella.

"Can you make some for Teddy too?" I said, rolling my head to the side for air. Birdie grunted at that. She’d moved to the stove now, pouring liquid into a big cauldron. I scrunched my face when she tossed something in that looked like chicken feet. "Real grand of you two, getting pissed during his training," she said. 

"Weren’t thinking," I said. She scoffed.

 _We didn’t want to,_ I thought. _We couldn’t._ And I felt a pang of guilt well up, thinking about how Teddy had downed a whole coffee pot this morning, the way he’d apparated back and forth because he’d forgotten half of his things. And all I could look at were his hands and his mouth and his eyes and his hair. That spot on his neck where my teeth had been. Because I did that. I really did that. 

I felt my chest rumble, put my hand there. "Birdie?"

"Mhm." Drawers creaking, the clink of porcelain.

"Were you ever sure? About someone? Like… _sure_ sure. You know?"

She turned, her skirts whirling dust off the ground. "What?"

"I mean," I swallowed, lifting my head, "you must’ve loved, like...a million people by now." Birdie laughed so loud it made Gus fall from the ceiling. "How did you - Were you ever sure about - "

"Shagging them?"

My cheeks prickled. "No, not - I mean, yeah, I guess that too, yeah. But I mean _sure_ sure. Like…there-can’t-be-anything-better-than-this sure." That tremendous feeling you had to feel, that light at the end of the tunnel. Like in those Barbara Cartland novels Lily read, where Muggle women swooned so much they were all half noodle, and the men were all giant horse knobs. With giant horse knobs.

I leaned across the table again, buried my face into my folded arms.

"Is that what your head gets up to when you’ve got the cocktail flu?"

"You mean brain-fucked by a giant Pear Dazzle cock," I mumbled, turning my head to look at her. Birdie laughed again, but it was short and not loud at all, and she leaned over the stove, hand on her hip. She swirled a ladle through the cauldron.

"So," she said. "There-can’t-be-anything-better-than-this sure, hm?" I nodded. "Suppose I knew it the least with the man I married. Perfect mystery, that one." Her face did that thing, like the way people looked before they kissed or fell asleep.

"But you must’ve felt it a little, right? You had to," I said, jerking upright when she tipped her head back again, and this time that big goblin laugh kicked me off my seat. It almost sounded angry.

"Isn’t that the problem with you lot? Everything has to be so bloody right, and you’ll have to know it if you feel it, because there’s no other way, because there can’t be anything better out there. Bunch of fucktrumpets..."

She flapped her hands, gesturing for me to shut up when I opened my mouth, her face pulling itself together, wrinkles bunching, and her chest heaving like she was about to burst into song.

"There’s always something better. But we take what we get, because we never get what we want, and people - Jesus Christ, people, Jacob! - they never turn out the way we need them to." She yanked the ladle out of the cauldron and pointed it at me, grey liquid plopping to the floor. "But here's the thing, yeah? The big, you know, the big secret. You give it time. You wait and you work." Ladle whooshing through the air. "You care. That's what you do. You care. Because anything’s worthwhile, because that’s all anyone wants, isn't it? To be worthwhile to someone."

And her face so full of things it overflowed, leaking down her neck, her chest, the frizz of her gazillion sweaters and skirts, and she looked so young like this, like she’d just been snogged or slapped, shook to the core by something. But it was gone before I could understand what it felt like to see her like this.

"So, to hell with being sure," she said. "Be patient." She cleared her throat, shook her head and turned to the cauldron to fetch me some miracle cocktail-flu goop. "Now drink and shut up."

 

◆

 

It felt like a dance, clunky and uncoordinated, something almost as awful as Lily’s Macarena and the Sprinkler. But it was us. Teddy and me pivoting around each other, around this thing neither of us wanted to tumble into first. Careful but not, leaning closer, leaning back. 

We didn’t talk about it, overlooking it like a blind spot. But I felt it buzz between us, this knowing that we couldn’t turn back time. And I caught myself wondering whether I’d be okay with it if we could. If I would’ve changed it, said things differently, or if I would’ve said anything at all.

Squeezing past each other in the kitchen, shoulders brushing, his breath fanning my neck, the side of my face. My hand skimming past his when I reached for the salt. His thumb on my wrist when he gave me my coffee. Thighs bumping when we sat on the sofa, Teddy trying to explain Franz Kafka to me while I stared at his mouth, the way it stretched and popped around words, that wetness on his bottom lip. And how I caught the way he looked at me afterwards, that blue fog in his eyes, how he looked like he might fall asleep, like on that night. The night of all nights. 

But then the smalltalk. So much of it, I wanted to vomit. I felt like I was saying these things so I didn’t have to say what I needed to. And I felt like Teddy was only ever talking over me or past me, about the weather, the neighbour’s sleep apnea machine, Birdie’s scones.

_Have you written to your parents yet? How’s Albus? Lily?_

_Are you trying out for a Quidditch team?_

_Should I make dinner?_

Be patient, I kept thinking, trying to listen to the memory of a Birdie with a snogged-slapped face, a face like I’d never seen before, like she’d showed me her heart. _B_ _e patient._ I wanted to, I really fucking did, but I also wanted to grab Teddy’s head between my hands and shake him, really shake him, until his eyes rolled back and his skin turned red, yell into his face until it burst into flames. 

Even outside of my dreams, I was running after cryptic somethings, questions panting after answers.

_How did you want it to happen?_

_Are you sick of thinking about whether I think about you too?_

_Do you? Do you think about me?_

 

◆

 

"This isn’t working. Screw this. I can’t just - Why does it keep - " I bit back a groan, slamming my hands against the stupid steering wheel of this stupid car, because this stupid Muggle garbage of a gearshift was sent straight from hell to bite me in the arse. "I hate this."

Teddy shifted in his seat. "Jamie - "

"No, I’ve made up my mind. I hate this."

Just a few moments ago, Teddy had barely been able to lurch for the steering wheel before we’d skidded off the road. For the third time. This was garbage. I was garbage. And I watched a squirrel scurry out of the forest and onto the asphalt, and I wanted to run it over. I wanted to run Teddy over. And then I was going to slam a brick on the accelerator and let it run me over too.

The three of us, pancaked.

I listened to the crackle of the wonky radio that only worked when you jabbed it right. Shreds of some Muggle song blaring through the static, something about yachts and bums and more yachts.

Teddy sighed. "You’ll get a hang of it. In the beginning, it’s - Remember flying on a broom for the first time? And how everything just - "

"A broom? That’s a stick, Teddy. That’s a toothpick. This, this is a bloody - " I slammed my hands against the steering wheel before slamming my head against the horn just to hear it blare all the trees to the ground. Teddy flinched but let me be. I breathed in, breathed out, came up. The static of the radio like an itch in my ears, and I jammed my thumb against a button, but it didn’t turn off, because of course it didn’t, because nothing worked in this tiny turd mobile, and I hammered my fingers across any button I could reach, and fuck this, fuck all of this.

Grabbing the steering wheel, I jammed myself back into the seat, jammed my eyes closed even harder.

"You done?" I could hear the eyebrow-raise in Teddy’s voice. I exhaled, nodded. "Okay?" he said. "Okay," I said, opening my eyes to look at him. I wish I hadn’t. Teddy all Lumos smiles, all soft-shelled and patient. And I swallowed hard, hoping Jesus could hear me apologise all the way from wherever-the-hell, apologise for ever thinking about wanting to run this man over until he looked like a pancake. Even though he’d make a really, really handsome pancake. And just when I’d steadied myself and Jesus had pardoned me for ever thinking about Teddy being a really, really handsome pancake - he grabbed my hand.

"I told you. You need to be gentle," he said, so breezy. I wished I could hate him for it. But he brushed his thumb over my knuckles, that softness and firmness, and I felt it all the way in the middle of me, like when he said _James_ and I unfurled, like when he smiled and it was all mine.

Teddy placed my hand over the gearshift, our fingers laced, the tender throb of his palm. I imagined mine was throbbing too, in tune, out of tune. I imagined he felt it.

"Come on, one more time," he said, quieter than before. "Remember, it’s like - "

"If you say it’s like a broom, I’ll slam you through the windshield." I was quiet too. And then his coughed up laugh, his grip tightening around my hand, shifting the knob into first gear. "Easy now," he said, and it felt like he was so close, breathing down my neck, my spine, the place way below that made everything shake. "Easy," I repeated. I inhaled. He did too. "Easy." An exhale.

The motor hummed beneath my seat, gurgling. I slid my foot down, listened to the wheels grind across the asphalt. Teddy’s hand guiding mine into second gear. Faster. Third. Smooth and steady. And we’d done this about a billion times already, but instead of getting used to it, everything inside of me was loose and rattling and bouncing off the walls. I hoped he couldn’t hear. I was a giant pinball machine.

The blue-green blur of the woods flashed by the faster we went. Teddy’s hand on mine, still, always. I swallowed every time I felt the soft hiccup of the car when we switched gears. The quiet. My chest. Teddy’s steady breathing. I caught the bob in his throat, the way he brushed his thumb over my knuckles, and I was left to wonder whether he meant it.

We were going so fast now, my hand shaking every time it left the gearshift, left Teddy’s soft firmness, my fingers biting into the steering wheel so hard it stung. But it got easier. Teddy’s voice guiding me through. "There we go, that’s it. Relax." The swiftness of his hand when he helped me glide into the next corner, pulling lightly at the steering wheel. "Good." _Good_.

_Doing so well, Jamie._

_There you go._

_Good job._

I felt bloated with something, heavy and dense and alive, and it shot down my stomach, a big, big zing. "Good," Teddy said again, and I wanted more of it.

We shot out of the woods, driving down a straight smooth road cutting through the countryside. Mountain ranges jutting into the clouds in the distance. Sheeps dotting the rumbling hills.

Teddy cracked the windows open, the cool air slicing through, whipping hair into my face. Every few seconds, he reached over to brush it out of my eyes, held it up sometimes, his palm curved along my forehead. I laughed. I think he was laughing too. But it was too loud to really hear, and it was nothing but the warm certainty that he was there, and he was close, and this was okay.

Teddy’s hand left the gearshift and crept closer, brushing my knee before gripping into it. I sucked in a breath, felt it hot in my stomach. I turned to look at him, but he tilted my chin back before I could catch anything. "Eyes on the road," he said. I was hot-cold all over, inside-out, and I felt like I was stuck on the tipping point of the highest Wronski Feint in Quidditch history when Teddy’s hand pressed my knee down, slowly, slowly, the arrows on the dashboard flickering. The wind whipped harder, loud, like a wailing, the countryside whirling into nothing but colour. Until finally, heart in my throat, Teddy slammed my knee down all the way.

We blasted into space.

And this was stupid. And this was headless. And it was the best bloody thing in the whole bloody universe.

Bodies wedged into our seats, heads tipped, mouths open. Maybe I was shouting. Maybe he was. But I heard nothing but the wind ripping at us, at our arms and legs, yanking at our hair until we were scalpless.

"Holyshitholyshit - " My mouth garbling. Teddy’s hand around my knee, holding on. I wanted him to hold on tighter. I wanted to see the leftover of his hand, red and glowing, branded across my kneecap. And I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t miss the chance to look at him, like this, now. Because we were blasting through space, dodging meteors and satellites, hurtling around the sun like a slingshot.

I knew I shouldn’t, but then I did, because I couldn’t help myself, because it was Teddy, and when it was Teddy, I lost every single piece of me.

His mouth was yanked open, howling, the wind making his hair fly, and the way it shifted through colours, blue and green and red and yellow, nothing but a fuzz. But he was clear. In all of this, in all this space and speed and bleeding colour, he was clear, and he was all there, and he was so full. I wanted to swallow him whole. I wanted to keep him forever. 

But then Teddy’s smile dropped. He yelled something. His hand left my knee and stuttered towards my other leg, yanking it onto the brakes. I whipped my head towards the road, a cluster of white bunched on the asphalt. The blur of the world. And then that ear-splitting screech that reminded me of Gus when he didn’t get what he wanted. Seatbelts cutting into our chests. I was choking on it. My eyes closing, opening, closing. The car lurched. We slammed forward, slammed back.

Heaving.

Teddy leaned over me, almost pressed into my lap if it weren’t for the seatbelt keeping him upright, one hand still gripping my knee, the other twisted around his wand.

I looked up, stared at the sheep jiggling across the road.

"Holy shit." My ears felt full of cotton. "Sorry for - " I swallowed, cleared my throat, felt my heart beat in my eyeballs. "Sorry for almost killing us."

"Sorry for enforcing it."

I smoothed a shaky hand across the dashboard. "Didn’t you give me a whole speech about airbags?"

"It’s…an old car." Teddy unbuckled himself, slumping back in his seat. He shot me a side-look. "Don’t tell your Mum."

"You’re a schlong."

"Yes."

I barked a laugh, scrunching my face to mimic his. " _Myes_."

"Muppet." His hand against my cheek to push me away. I hadn’t heard him call me that in years. It made me laugh so hard my vision blurred. 

And maybe it was the sheeps and this car, this tiny turd mobile with malfunctioning airbags, and the sky and space and Teddy’s laugh like a sucker punch, all this adrenaline shooting up my spine, this high flying feeling like nothing would get any better, ever. Because it couldn’t. Because it would go against the order of the universe and the Word of God and Honeydukes’s Jelly Slugs (because they might as well be the holiest of all holy divine things).

This couldn’t end.

Too bad Jelly Slugs and God had trouble hearing you all the way from Dunwell.

 

◆

 

Teddy smoothed down his sweater. He twitched every once in a while, chewing on a finger, on gum, on a leftover chocolate wand, reaching into the back pocket of his trousers, looking for a cigarette packet that wasn’t there. I hadn’t seen him come home this exhausted in days, lugging himself through the flat with his face half on, hair brown and drooping. And now this.

 _'I promised her we’d do it today. I have to. I promised,'_ he’d said, leaning over the bathroom sink, his face shifting through forms. Morphing. Like an athlete warming up before a run. I hadn’t seen him do that in the longest time.

It had taken me a while to understand what was going on, that strange silence on him, on Birdie too when she’d told me I could come this evening. A sadness there that I didn’t know what to do with.

"Are you sure?" I asked, flicking my eyes from Birdie’s gnarled door to look up at him. Teddy pulled a hand through his hair. He nodded. "She told you, right? It’s fine," he said. "It’s fine."

It didn’t feel fine at all.

But before I could tug at the sleeve of his jumper to tell him that maybe me being here was the worst idea of all time, the door whipped open, Birdie there, curled into a mountain of cardigans. Her hair was tamed back and twisted into a braid. She was dressed nicer than usual.

She looked at the floor. Birdie never looked at the floor. "You want to do it by the door or what?" And she sounded annoyed enough for me to relax a little. I nodded. "Hey."

"Do I look like 14? Don’t hey me," she muttered,bumbling into the kitchen and motioning for us to close the door. Teddy gave me a side-look, the tiniest hint of a smile there. I let it uncoil me.

Birdie flapped her hand at the table in the living room, decked out in what looked like the fanciest tea set she owned, all glass, clusters of melted candles spread throughout. We’d never sat at this table before, too polished and awkward for Birdie’s tiny witchy matchbox. Like someone had given it to her as a present, someone who didn't know her at all. 

I looked up at Teddy when I sat down, flicking my head towards a chair, gesturing for him to sit. But he stood there, wavering, a low-dangling herb pouch bumping against his forehead. I caught the bob in his throat when Birdie returned from the kitchen and sat down. "Well, come on," she said. "Tea won’t drink itself."

Teddy jerked his head like he was shaking something off, before he took a seat opposite from us. I kicked my foot against his under the table, tried to make my face look as reassuring as I could when he looked my way. That tiny smile again. He nodded. I nodded. Birdie didn’t say anything, letting Gus crawl into one of the sleeves of her cardigan to watch her pour the tea. Teddy ended up stacking sugar cubes in his cup, and I didn’t know if it was out of nervousness or if he was genuinely in the mood for tooth decay.

We drank in silence, all this the tension wired through the room like we were starting a seance, a conjuring of the dead. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought this was the closest I’d ever get to something like it.

I heard the gulp when Birdie swallowed, Gus staring at her form the sleeve of her cardigan, swallowing too. Teddy watched her, waiting. The soft strokes of his face in candlelight. He set his cup on the saucer. A tender clink. He sucked in a breath. "If you don’t want to do it today, we don’t - "

"No," she said. It rang through the room. "It’s already been a month." She swallowed again, and Gus swallowed again too, shaking his head when she shook hers, her hair crackling like something alive, and I wanted to reach out and loosen her braid, let it breathe.

She wiped her hands across her cheeks, downed her tea, cleared her throat, nodded. A silent okay.

Reaching into her cardigan, she pulled out something that looked like a folded piece of paper and handed it to Teddy. I narrowed my eyes. A picture, withered yellow, crimped through its centre like it had gone through a lifetime’s worth of folding and crumpling, tucked into pockets and purses and wedged between books. I caught a glimpse of a man’s face but couldn’t make out the rest when Teddy brushed his thumb over the surface. His eyes stayed locked on it, an intensity there like he was staring right into the core of something far, far away.

I jerked when Birdie grabbed my hand, firmer than I expected, those calloused frail fingers.

And then like a blanket tugged over him, a changing like the pages on a flip clock, Teddy’s face fell to reveal another, skin losing colour, features sharper, shorter, hair curling and curling, the wiry tufts of a beard sprouting around his jaw. He grew, his shoulders torn wide, fingers bulging. He barely fit on his seat. And then his eyes, blown blue one moment, brown the next. So brown they were black. So black they were chasms.

I sucked in a breath, swore the universe did too. But Birdie was so quiet, as still as a figurehead staring up at a wave that swallowed the sky. And we were all so quiet too, even poo-smearing Gus, staring at the Teddy who wasn’t Teddy anymore, the Teddy who was a man twice his size, decked in a navy uniform, badges littering one side of his broad chest.

I didn’t know how long we sat there, breathing and not breathing, forgetting and remembering to. 

And when Birdie finally moved, I swore I heard something inside of me, something in all of us, sighing. She squeezed my hand two times before letting go, and she inched towards Not-Teddy, careful, his eyes following her, deep and dark and roiling like the sea of Dunwell. And one of her gnarled hands reaching for his young smooth ones, spreading them open, putting her fingers there to bury them deep. She lifted another to his face, the shakiness of it, and it was the first time I realised just how old she was, how tired, just how much she’d left behind…when she was face to face with the things she used to have.

Her hand on his cheek. "There he is." I didn’t know people could look so happy being in pain. "My perfect fucking mystery."

I blinked. I looked away, looked at my hands dug in my lap. I didn’t know why I was here, and I didn’t know if this was okay. I felt like I’d stomped over hallowed ground without knowing, cracked a chapel ceiling, dug up a grave, too late to undo it now, trying not to look, to watch Birdie close her eyes and dig her hands into his face like she was looking for something. 

She wheezed now, breathing so hard I was afraid she’d break a rib. And that man. Somewhere in all of that strange skin and bone and hair, was Teddy, curled into himself like the last ring in a tree trunk, a bucket at the bottom of a well. I imagined myself cracking his head open and peeling him back to find him down there. Teddy sitting at the bottom, looking up.

And when my hands started to vibrate with how much I needed to, I stared at Gus instead, his button eyes strained on Birdie’s hands roaming over that person’s face. Her person. Her perfect fucking mystery.

I thought of those hands on the ground of a graveyard. _'I do something for him.'_ I thought of Teddy staring at her with a face that wasn’t his. _'He does something for me.'_

 

◆

 

We passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth, sitting on opposite sides of a dry tub the way we used to when we were kids. A sacred place with the shower curtain drawn, Al and Teddy and me, squashed against the porcelain talking about how Mrs Higgs teeth were so big she couldn’t close her mouth, Al daydreaming about that pretty exchange student from Ilvermorny, how he liked the way she spoke because it reminded him of butterscotch, and Teddy and me shooting each other looks over Al’s tiny shoulders, grinning, taunting him with it for the rest of the year.

Teddy wiped a hand across his face, the corners of it flickering like he was still trying to shrug him off. The remnants of him, clinging to Teddy like a ghost crossing over.

I took a swig from the bottle, coughed away the burn before handing it back to him. Teddy wedged it between his legs. I cleared my throat. "Do you think that’s good for her?" I said. I didn’t know how to ask these things, didn’t know how to hold the weight of them in my mouth. "Do you think it’s healthy?"

Teddy didn’t look at me when he stretched his legs out beside mine, entangling, all that heat pooling where our trousers touched.

"She’s so old," he said to his feet, and I waited for him to say more but he didn’t.

It was weird remembering a time where we’d sat like this, laughing about Lily’s daft new boyfriends and Teddy’s fit new girlfriends (so many girlfriends), whispering like we were conspiring, like we were telling each other secrets we’d have to lock in our coffins with us. But looking at him like this, face flushed with whiskey and exhaustion, it felt like another lifetime. Another Teddy. Another me. Sometimes, maybe, I missed them.

Teddy played with the shower curtain, ruffled it until all I could hear was static. "Birdie -" He let go of it, but it clung to the fuzz of his jumper. "She’s been through so much. She’s been through everything," he said. "And she loves him." He looked at me, into me. _And she loves him._ That same look on his face like hers. That strange mixture of happypain, all tender and crooked. And the loneliness. So much of it there was no more space left for it to go but out. 

"To just - to be able to see someone again. Just to touch them, you know? To be with them. Just for a while." He stuttered a breath. "Who am I to tell her that’s not okay?"

I knew I was nodding, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt nothing but him. Teddy filled the tub, the whole bathroom, the flat. Teddy spilt down every road of Dunwell. Teddy was everywhere, was everything.

And I couldn’t help but glare at that memory floating in the back of my mind, next to all the ones I didn’t like to think about. Studland Bay. Al, small and frail, whispering something into my ear. Because he was always whispering, especially at night. And the sunburn on his nose glowed in the dark, and he was tugging at my arm, tugging me out of my sleep, and I wanted to tell him to be quiet because Teddy was sleeping, and I looked up at the bars of wood, the top of the bunk bed. But Al kept shaking his head, shaking and shaking, all that hair. _’No. No, he’s in the bathroom,'_ he said, wide-eyed, all pupil. _’He’s turning into that woman again. The one with the purple hair.'_

No one ever worried about Teddy.

Because no one ever bothered. Because it was so easy to forget that there was a flip side to everything, that sometimes we had to be one thing so we didn’t have to be the other. And I looked at him like this, and he was open and spilling over, and I wished I could unbutton my chest, tuck him into deepest parts of myself. I wanted to know where all that pain came from, like a well I could dry up, and I’d sift out bucket after bucket until it was empty.

I wanted to carry the world for him.

Tucking my legs under myself, I leaned forward, grabbing his hands to pull him close. He let me. And when I smoothed my fingers across his jaw and buried my mouth in his hair, when I kissed him there, when he shivered, and I died, because I was always, always dying - he let me do that too.

I wasn't going to let go, ever. And I wasn’t sure about how long ever was, two weeks, a month, a year, five minutes. Maybe that was okay. Because maybe even though I wasn’t sure about now or anything at all, at least I had this and only this.

At least I’d finally caught up to an answer.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is complete telenovela cheese
> 
> also i'm adding another chapter (maybe two??) because my telenovela-cheese-making ass is literally incapable of keeping things brief
> 
> [tumblr](https://the-tortellini-man.tumblr.com/)//[twitter](https://twitter.com/its_me_pastaboy)


	4. Chapter 4

"God, that’s ugly, we need to - "

"If you’d stop fiddling around with it, then maybe it wouldn’t look like this."

"It’s not my fault it looks like shit. Actual shit. Literal faecal matter, like, ingested - "

"Jamie."

"Edwardius." I didn’t know if he was trying to glare at me or if he was about to have a seizure. I stared down at the faecal-matter bow mushed on our equally turd-crimped present. The two of us squashed on the rug, trunks shoved aside, laps sprinkled with paper shreds and tape, a pair of rusty scissors, Teddy’s phone propped up on a book with a woman flickering on the screen, speeding through the million steps of 'The Finch Double Twist Wrap: Easy Peasy!’.

Staring down at our unfortunate creation - that’s what Teddy kept calling it, _unfortunate_ , because he wouldn’t admit that it looked digested - Teddy wiped a hand down his face. "We can’t give this to her." I nodded, yanking at a flapping piece of wrapper spattered in hearts.

It was the only one they had at that rotting supply store next to the pub, storefront cracked, where the old lady behind the counter kept trying to sell us spliff, smelling of it herself, those thick fumes of alcohol and boredom. Everyone in Dunwell smelled the same.

I groaned. "Why can’t we just use a spell and be done with it? This is like master origami levels of fuckery."

"Because that’s cheating." Teddy grabbed his phone, playing the video over again and over again, that woman with her jangly earrings flipping her hands over, under, across the gift wrapper, folding twice, three times, paper flying, all those fancy folds. _"And there you go. Easy peasy!"_ Her glitter-spangled fingers hovering over the finished gift in a silent ta-dah. I was going to scream if she said easy peasy one more bloody time. Teddy looked like he was going to cry or vomit, and that made me want to cry or vomit too, and then I thought about the two of us crying and vomiting, and aside from us being actual knobheads, it would probably be a great bonding experience.

Teddy shook his head, playing the video again, cursing when it glitched. I groaned and flopped to the floor, spreading myself across the rug. I pulled at the strings of Teddy’s jumper, hard enough for him to jerk towards me so I could play with the metal sheath. If there weren’t actual fumes puffing out of his ears, I’d put it in my mouth. "Why’d you have to choose the hardest one? Who comes up with these names anyways. Double twist my arse."

He shushed me. "No, wait. How is she - " His hands trying to keep up, knuckles stirring, veins bulging there.

Gift wrapping paper. It was paper. How were we messing up this bad at folding paper?

I pushed myself up after he’d butchered everything we’d gotten so far. "Teddy."

"What?" He sighed, slamming the gift on the floor.

"No."

"What no?"

"No, see? You did it wrong again." I flicked his fingers away, gripping into the frayed corners, everything donkey-eared and crumpled. Teddy cleared his throat. "Okay, but look." His hand next to mine, always in the way, and I kept yanking and he kept yanking back, paper half torn, skin sticky with tape. My muffled groaning. All his sighing and sighing. "Teddy."

Our fingers linked. I didn’t know why he kept pulling at mine like he was wrestling to hold on. I looked up, caught the way he looked at me, heavy and thick, that tiny smile gleaming like a surprise, a penny on the pavement. I swallowed, looked back down. "We need to finish this," I said, hating how much I sounded like him, hating the way my voice cracked. I brushed his fingers off before I got any more ideas. And I had so many of them, too many not to reach out and show him.

_Let me put your jumper strings in my mouth, get them stuck between my teeth. Your fingers, your fucking fingers. I want to eat your whole stupid, stupid, perfect face for breakfast._

Teddy sighed again, leaning forward, rubbing his head into my shoulder for a moment. And, godfuck, it made something inside of me flip over, twist upside-down, and I didn’t know where my hands were, what they were there for, my head screwed on backwards. I felt him breathe in, or maybe I heard it, or maybe he wasn’t breathing at all, or I wasn’t.

He always had to make this so hard. 

"Okay," he said, pulling away. The buoyant voice of the gift wrapper woman trilling through phone speakers. " _Easy peasy!_ "

I glared at her over Teddy’s shoulder. He chuckled, low enough for me to feel it in places I didn’t want to think about. But I did. But I couldn’t. And I knew he was still looking, felt him on me, in me. Felt that everything was different now.

It didn’t have to be in my head anymore, the way I’d seep back into my thoughts where I could do these things to him, where I could fall into his lap, grab him, sink my teeth into his hand or his throat or his belt. Because he was grabbing me now - during breakfast, reading on the sofa, doing the dishes, brushing our teeth - reaching for my hand to inspect it, rubbing my earlobe between his fingers, whispering, ' _They’re so small…_ ' And I’d wonder what his tongue might feel like there, or that magical spot under my ear that made everything go black, where Demelza Abbott had sloshed her giant mouth-breather mouth against in second year, all saliva and dog-panting huffs, her braces gnawing my skin apart. And I was thirteen and horny without knowing I was horny, and I swore nothing in the world could feel that good. (Until I had my first orgasm and realised the universe could speak to you through your penis).

But I didn’t care where Teddy touched me anymore; I just needed him to. I just needed and needed, and he kept giving in until I swore his hands were in all the places my skin used to be, until I was 90% big-warm-soft and 10% me-typical stupidity. I forgot what it felt like when it was just us and all that weird back-and-forth, the two of us inching closer, inching away, leaving me wondering whether it meant something or mattered lying in bed at night, staring holes into the ceiling.

Because now Teddy was everywhere, and it meant something, because it had to, and I didn’t know what to do with it, like I’d been handed something so sacred I didn’t know if I could put it down or if I should keep holding it, care for it, rock it to sleep.

This was it. This was mine. And having a piece of it at all might as well be the biggest fucking miracle since the Tutshill Tornados won against the Wimbourne Wasps in 1994. (When Merwyn Finwick nailed the closest Wronski Feint in Quidditch history and proved once and for all that he was the closest thing the wizarding world had to Jesus.) And it was my miracle. To have Teddy touching me like I was one of the girls he used to pull in school. All of his in-between-classes gallantries.

' _They like hand stuff_ ,' he’d said one Christmas - Al in bed already, knocked out from one too many rounds of Gobstones - the two of us crunched against each other in the bathtub with the curtains drawn. Buzzing on leftover pumpkin juice and Gran’s sticky cauldron cakes. His dusk-settled eyes. Mine as wide open as the rest of me. Because you had to be for these things. Because I swore Teddy held all the wisdom in the world at sixteen. ’ _Touching, you know? Like, ask for her eraser…and then your hand…and her hand…'_ he whispered. ' _And do it slow, you know? Do it slow. It’s so easy._ ' And I thought with a face like that, everything was easy. With a face like that, you didn’t have to ask girls for erasers.

That night, wedged against each other so close I heard his heart throb through the yellowed porcelain, the stench of shampoos and crusty bar soaps, all I could think about was what my body would do if Teddy’s hands ever touched me like that. How readily I would let him. I’d give him the rest of me, the rest of my life. I’d be the easiest of them all.

But back then I never thought Teddy would be tugging at the hem of my sweater for attention, the loop of my pants, my belt, my pinkie, laughing at how quick I’d jerk my knee when his nails ran across the bone, the way I’d pull my leg back when he’d yank at a toe, wrapping my hair around a finger because, ' _How did it get so long…Like a lion’s mane…_ ' Whispering things I didn’t think he thought about. Because he thought about me.

_You think about me too._

And I hated that no one ever told you how different things were when you finally got a taste of what you’d killed yourself over, choked yourself for. How little you knew what do with it, how much you thought you would.

Teddy grabbed his phone and slammed it screen-down on the rug. Tugging the gift from my hands, prying my fingers off one by one, he taped down the rest of the flapping paper. I scrunched the bow together and popped it on top. "There," he breathed. "Done," I breathed too. And when he smiled, I didn’t blink until my eyes watered. 

 

◆

 

"Jamie!" Mum’s shrieking blew leftover Floo Powder off my shoulders. "Happy birthday," I said, grinning, chest crumpling when she bulldozed into me. She smelled like Yorkshire pudding and Dad’s cologne, and her hair everywhere, ribboned around my head until all I saw was red. "Hi, Mum." I heard the smile in her voice like a bell. "Hello, love." I gripped her even tighter when Lily bounded down the creaky stairs of the Burrow, wrapping herself around us like a monkey. "Okay, I can’t breathe." And Lily’s stupid laugh rattling through us.

Squeezing her way out of my arms, Mum pulled Teddy into a hug. "Edward," she hummed. "Happy Birthday, Ginny." He could hum things too. And that look on his face, beaming at me over her shoulder, that flood of something so warm I could feel it flood over me too, something almost like relief. He smiled. I smiled back.

Lily started going boneless in my arms, the way she used to when she fought for attention without wanting to waste her words, giggling when I had to dig my hands under her arms to keep her upright. I rolled my eyes. "What’s up, noodle?" My hand in her hair. No one told you how much you ended up missing the people you swore you’d never miss in your life. Especially tiny mean sausage fiends who couldn’t play the guitar with a wand to their throats.

"God, it’s so boring without you," she grunted, sliding out of my arms like goo. "No one to yell at." I laughed at that, thinking Al was way too reasonable to fall for her bullshit. The anti-hothead of the family.

"Nugget," I mumbled into her hair, hot as a firecracker.

She snorted. "Dildo."

"Lily." Mum shot her a look. I squeezed her tiny nose until she punched out a squawk and Gran stumbled out of the kitchen with a butcher knife, almost letting it clatter to the floor when she spotted us, softening, ruddy-cheeked and so quickly at ease. "There you are." Waving the knife back and forth. "Christ, put that down," Mum said. And Teddy laughed, and Lily laughed because she always had to laugh when Teddy laughed, because he had that laugh that was funnier than whatever he was laughing at. Dad and Al’s chuckles tumbled down from somewhere upstairs. The ghoul banging on the pipes.

I couldn’t help myself, and I smiled so hard Lily smacked my face, mumbling something about me looking like a serial killer.

 

◆

 

Somewhere buzzing in the back of my head, I knew that Teddy needed this more than I did, that maybe he’d always needed it more than anyone. Being here, being together.

It was weird realising everyone moved on even when you weren’t there, the reality of things weighing heavier when you didn’t have to experience it through words on paper, weathered and crumpled and owl-beak-furrowed. It had only been two months, but it felt like we’d missed out on years. And I’d missed it. I’d missed them and being with them, and the loudness and the mess, glasses toppling over, hovering cakes bumping against chairs and foreheads, rolling stray cherries, someone’s laughter choked on a crumb, the ghoul and his pipes, feet jabbing feet beneath the table, and the scratch of Gran’s voice veiled behind quiet encouragements when she’d try to stuff us full with food until we’d look like the outcome of an Inflatus spell gone wrong.

And then Teddy.

Teddy with his mouth blasting at full Lumos. All that tension unspooling, like a thread pulled, until his limbs went slack, dangling, so laid-back lazy, until he was telling stories with his hands whooshing through the air, until he was helping Mum clean up the table with that tender bounciness that made him look like he was dancing.

I hadn’t seen him smile like this in so long, and he was all there and so at ease, and it was for everyone, glowing, that pinched-skinned ruddiness smeared across his face. He looked really happy. And that made me really happy too. And wiping the table down with a dishcloth, I couldn’t help but steal another million glances, and I was being so dumb, because he was being so dumb too, and he looked at me from where he was standing at the sink, drying dishes, trying to wink but ending up blinking with both eyes.

Later in the living room, curled around mugs of Gran’s mulled wine (that made you see double if you didn’t keep count), Mum laughed when Teddy handed her our gift.

"Wow." Lily whistled. "How high were you when you wrapped it?" I threw the nearest pillow at her face. "A for effort."

Mum laughed even harder when she ripped off the rest of the paper, a giant box full of Birdie’s herbs perched on her lap: gnome-repellant, bone knitters, something to fix the 'flux of the belly', to make the ghoul sleep, teas, spices, powders against genital warts ( _'You never know, Jeremiah!'_ ), against pixie bites and the gloom of glumbumble treacle, against wrinkles ( _'Tell her to bathe in it for an hour, and she’ll pop out looking like an unseasoned virgin on a bedspread.' - 'Ew, Birdie.' - 'That’s what unseasoned virgins say.'_ )

And Mum, all flushed and lolling against Dad’s shoulder, was tipsy enough that she grabbed our mutilated bow and popped in on her head, balancing it like a cheap tea party hat. "Tell the bird woman thank you," she said, the gentlest huff, grinning and beautiful, and Teddy looked at me again, winking or maybe just blinking wrong, and he smiled, and everything just felt good, felt right, that big bubble of it in my chest.

Because I knew the flip-side to this. I knew what Teddy looked like without a smile, and I knew that nothing in the world would fit those people-shaped holes he carried. But I looked at tipsy Mum and trying-really-hard-not-to-act-tipsy Dad and Gran, Lily plucking at her mistuned guitar, Al nibbling on his nails in the corner, the rest of the family sprinkled across the living room rug in a flood of open letters and gifts (and one howler, probably George’s because he was a, ' _Lovely fucking dick…_ ' Mum had mumbled when she thought no one was listening).

I looked at Teddy, balmy and unguarded and part of this. And I knew we weren’t the right shape to fit any holes, but we were stubborn and delusional, and we’d keep trying any way we could.

In my head, I was holding his hand, and he was holding mine back. In my head, I was big enough to pull everyone into my arms at once, wrap myself around the whole Burrow until no one could breathe, and they were all choking, and I was smiling, because I felt like my face had frozen around it, and I was going to look like a serial killer for the rest of my life.

I snapped out of it when Al cleared his throat. Curled into the big armchair by the fireplace, his eyes flicked from Teddy to me - and that furrowed crevice in his face when a piece fell into place.

 

◆

 

"So you and Teddy." Al leaned back against the bookshelf, a flurry of dust puffing up from behind his head. He sneezed. I opened my mouth but slammed it shut. I closed my eyes, listened to the rumble of voices downstairs, the distinct low lull of Teddy’s, his laughing and his sighing. I could find him in the dark.

Stumbling over an inhale, I opened my eyes. Al’s face went tender, his mouth fluttering through breath, the tiny strain in his brow. He nodded, massaging his fingers.

No one ever understood me when I said Albus was the loudest quiet person I knew. Al who chewed on his nails, picked at his earlobes, always fidgeting and gesturing, like he was having conversations with you that you weren’t aware you were a part of. Al who snuck up on you, Al who stood in corners and thresholds and shadows. Al who puzzled things together before you even knew there was a puzzle to begin with. Al who listened.

And the way he was looking at me now, watching, always watching like he was waiting to catch me in a lie, eyes scouring every corner of my face, mapping me out - nose to mouth to eyes to cheekbones to ears and back. The way he made me feel so dug-into, crowbarred-apart.

I didn’t know why I’d tried to keep something from someone who probably knew it before I did. Al always knew. _'He’s got that big feeling about things,'_ Mum used to say. _'Comes with the name.'_

Albus. Like an incantation.

Sliding to the floor, Al patted a hand on the spot next to him. I took a breath but gave in when he cocked an eyebrow (which was terrifying sometimes because he could make it touch his hairline).

There wasn’t much space in Grandpa’s study to begin with, every tiny inch of it stuffed with bookshelves and luggage and crooked cuckoo clocks with the birds missing, a desk wedged somewhere beneath all the mess, the leftover indent of him on the red-cushioned chair.

Al spent a lot of time reading in here. He’d never said it, but I thought Al missed Grandpa more than most of us.

Shimmying into the tight space next to him, more dust puffed around us, and Al grinned when it made me sneeze this time. I rubbed my nose. "Do you think it’s okay?" I said before I’d even realised that I thought about things like this.

Shrugging, he picked at his thumb. "Why are you asking me?"

"Because…I don’t know. Because it’s Teddy," I said. "And it’s me." _And the chances of it. Like it’s this big cosmic accident. Like all the other Jamies in all the other universes wouldn’t dare dream of touching all the Teddys the way I want to touch this one. And I do. I do so much. I can’t sleep with how much I do._

"And what? You want me to say that it’s not okay?"

I huffed. "No, I - " We stayed quiet. Or maybe it was me trying not to blurt something stupid and Al trying to catch me blurt something stupid.

I stared at our feet, legs stretched out beside each other. Al’s small toes wiggling in those small knitted Christmas socks Gran had given him last year.

I felt him look at me, peeling me back, slowly, slowly. "What’s it like?" The linger to his voice, like he was ready to keep whatever secret I was willing to hand over. My mouth opened, shut, tongue reeling for the right things to say. I mushed a hand across my face until I was tingly all over.

"I don’t know…" I shrugged. But Al kept looking at me, waiting. "I mean, I don’t know, it’s like…Do you remember what Gran said once?" I felt him hold his breath, and he was so still, not fidgeting, not once. I laughed, but I didn’t feel like laughing, and it didn’t sound like I did. "That sometimes you meet someone and it’s like, like, when a song comes on and you just gotta dance. And it’s - You know?"

And how that was the dumbest slab of cheese I’d heard in my whole life, and how I’d started making farting noises with my hands, and how Gran had nailed my head into place with that stare, that I’ve-lived-a-million-years-you-little-shit stare that only grandmas had when you reminded them that the breadth of your life so far was as thick as a pin. She’d told me, pruny finger jutting into the air, _'Just you wait, James Sirius Potter. Just you bloody wait.'_

And I didn’t. Until I did. Until I understood that the songs we used to dance to weren’t always going to be there for dancing. Because sometimes those songs just got stuck in your head, spiralling, until the words didn’t mean a thing and the letters didn’t mesh, and it was awful because maybe you hated it now, because you knew it and knew it and knew it, and maybe sometimes we stopped understanding the things we knew the most. And then you lost it or you left it, because we were always losing things and leaving things, and we were always moving on.

But now it came sometimes, and I remembered it like a feeling, like the press of a thumb on my pulse, like a mouth on my forehead, and I’d tap my feet to the ghost-beat of it, to the memory of having danced and danced to this, and hated it and lost it, and for that second, that verse on loop, I felt all the warmth rush over, knowing I’d always have it somewhere, found. That certainty that came with familiarity, knowing something for so long and knowing that it knew you just as well.

I groaned and slapped my hands against my face again. The more I thought about it the less it made sense. "You know what, never mind. It’s stupid."

"It’s not stupid." Albus shook his head, so earnest and so serious, with all the wisdom of someone living under the wingspan of that name. "It’s not stupid," he said again.

In my head, I took his hand and crunched it tight.

 

◆

 

We left late, still buzzing on Gran’s mulled wine and a home full of people who’d wanted us there, and it was that big insatiable feeling that you didn’t want the night to end because it couldn’t and you couldn’t let it, because it was everything and held everything. Teddy’s smile sparked in the dark as he marched ahead after the Portkey spit us out, making sure to lift branches out of my way, swinging one arm forward and the other tucked back like some old Victorian butler, like he was going to throw himself across puddles and let me walk over his spine. That smile, so bright against the blackness of everything, nothing but floating teeth. I stumbled after him, said his name, said it once more when he said mine back. 

"Jamie!" From the cluster of trees ahead. "Teddy!" The echo of my voice hopping through the night for him to catch. _Jamie. Teddy. Jamie. Teddy._ I laughed. He laughed. His big blinding teeth.

"Teddy!" We stumbled out onto the wet open road. The town lit up in the distance. The wind whipping, whistling. Teddy stopped a few paces ahead. He turned to look at me, and even in the dark, even when I was too tired to see a thing, his hair was the bluest and the brightest, the blazing tip of a roman candle.

"James." _James_.

And with all that awful mulled wine and the feeling, lost and found songs, and the unbelievable goodness as of late, the goodness that didn’t make sense but somehow did, but never would, and the way I didn’t know how to hold any of it, all of it, him. Him.

I reached out, and he came towards me, taking my hand like he was taking a breath, because it was imperative, because there was only so long until he couldn’t stand not to.

I hoped my teeth glowed too when I smiled up at him. I hoped he thought about these things just as much. And when I yanked him down the road, the lights of Dunwell reeling us in, Teddy coughed up a laugh and followed.

Birdie let us in when we pounded our fists against her door, roaring like the town drunks, dragging her out of bed and into the living room, to the kitchen table, all of us huddled around her oldest bottle of Macallan that she only yanked out from under the bumpy sofa on Christmas, or when someone died, "Or when someone dies on Christmas. Happened twice already, mind you. Everyone I know is older than a tub of bog butter," she said and started laughing, like really, really laughing, laughing the way she never did. It was so late it was early, and she was probably delirious out of her mind, all that tenderness when she rubbed at her sunken eyes.

"Anyways, it’s not like beauty sleep would do me any good at this point." She laughed again, harder now that Gus had been shaken awake, tumbling down one of the ceiling beams and fluttering around us, trying to snatch a sip of Macallan.

Teddy reached out and curled a loose frizzy curl behind Birdie’s ear. She reminded me of those kids who’d stood too close to their exploding cauldrons in potions class.

"Shut it. You’re lovely," he said. Birdie’s face cracked open for a moment, that crunch of colour on her cheeks as she leaned into his hand. "And you’re drunk," she said.

"The prettiest lady in all the world." I let Gus dunk his head down my glass, watching his tiny tongue slosh around, which was kind of disgusting because he put his tongue anywhere he could, but I chugged down the rest anyways.

Birdie laughed. Clinking her glass against mine, I caught the gentlest thing burrowed into the crooks and folds of her face, snogged-slapped. And she looked at Teddy, even gentler now. "Looks good on you." She whispered this, and when Birdie whispered things, they might as well be sacramental. "What?" It was weird how Teddy could straighten his back but look like he was crawling into his jumper. "A real smile," she said, still whispering, and I nodded, because she was righter than righter than right. "I smile all the time." Teddy scrunched his face as he twirled the edge of his glass on the table.

But Birdie’s eyes did that thing that Mum did sometimes too, that quiet nudge to her head, smile slowly spreading, because she knew something that you didn’t understand, and she knew that one day you would, and that put her at ease. 

"It’s a real nice smile," she said. As coy as a kid, Teddy kept twirling his glass, smiling that real nice smile of his. He looked at me when I bumped my foot against his, going hazy when I brushed it against the lean line of his calf.

I didn’t realise I was still nodding.

We clinked our glasses together, and Birdie started telling us the story of that time an old goblin had a heart attack on Christmas Eve, face plopping into his onion soup, and how they’d declared him dead up until he jumped to life two hours later, tap-dancing along to Frankie Avalon. "Crazy fuckers…If I’m ever reborn, let me be a wretched little goblin man."

 

◆

 

Birdie kicked us out when the first shards of morning broke, all of us sluggish and mumbling. Pulling me up the stairs out back, Teddy clenched his hand around my wrist so tight I was sure he could tap along to my pulse. I imagined him trying to pry his fingers out later, hopelessly, and we’d have to stay stuck like this forever. Hand to wrist. Wrist to hand. Teddyjamie. _Teddyjamie…_

"What?"

I blinked, feeling my mouth move and realising I’d been saying it out loud. He laughed, pulling me up the last few stairs and into the flat. His hand wrenched free. It almost made me shout, feeling like he’d torn half of me with him. But then his other hand found my back, the curve below, as he tugged me inside, and this time I swore - _this time_ \- we’d never get off of each other.

_Teddyjamie._

I looked up at him, still so close. The early morning blues hitting him from all sides at once, and he looked a little wrung-dry and tired, hair drooping, but his eyes were on me, brighter than a bluebell flame. He swallowed. I heard it all the way inside of me, heard him breathe, heard the sound of his hand crunching into the cotton of my jumper.

"Jamie?" His mouth.

"Yeah?"

Another swallow. I wanted to tip forward, put my mouth to his Adam’s apple and taste it throb.

"I know it wasn’t much." His fingers brushed along the curve of my spine. "But this was good. This was the nicest day in a really long time. And…"

"And," I mouthed, and he smiled and said, "I’m glad you’re here. I mean, I’m glad you’re still - I’m glad you’re staying. I mean, I hope you are, just, like, just a little while longer." He stumbled to a stop and stared at the ceiling. "Christ, I can’t speak."

I grinned harder when he looked back down. I wished I was awake enough to tell him I hoped every day from now on was just as good as this one. And I wished I could tell him that these two months had gone by like two days, and that I was sorry for turning his secret-chocolate-stashed office into a cave with an inflatable mattress that was never fully inflated because I never really cared enough, the curtains half-drawn, clothes on the floor, boxers hanging from a chair, Chinese takeout forgotten in a corner. It was disgusting. But it was all mine. Mine in the midst of Teddy’s things. A crack in his palm.

I wanted to be here. I wanted to listen to him shuffle through the flat at the asscrack of dawn, hardwood floor creaking and crunching while he brushed his teeth, wanted to hear the steady drip-drop of the coffee machine, and the way he hummed songs when he’d had a good night’s rest. Those weird nursery rhymes Andromeda would sing to us when we came over for Easter, parents drunk on the leather sofas, kids sandwiched on the rug in front of the fireplace, my fingers brushing through Teddy’s hair so I could watch it change colour. Back when it didn’t matter, back when I didn’t know that touching him would one day feel like touching the deep, deep inside of something, like touching a nerve or the thought of a thought.

Teddy’s eyes softened, brows tugged, like he was sad, sunken, thinking, and he rocked forward, towards me, until I was I looking at him the way I was sure people looked at meteor showers and Big Ben and the enchanted ceiling in the Great Hall - the very first time, your robe too long, dragging dust across the ground, but you couldn’t care less because you were looking up, and this was it. This was everything.

"Teddy?" Like I was making a wish and telling a secret all in one.

"Yeah?"

Another bob of his Adam’s apple. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to trace the swell of his bottom lip with a thumb, wanted and wanted so much, wanted to bite his chin, brush a knuckle down the bridge of his nose, wanted to stick my fingers into his dimples, feel his eyelashes beat against my cheeks.

I took a breath, felt the Macallan taped to my gums, those bitter fumes in my throat, smelled his cologne, my cologne, the dampness of the woods still knotted into our clothes.

I swallowed, shook my head like I was trying to shake something out, but I was stuck, and I wanted to be.

"Nothing," I said.

 

◆

 

This was the closest I’d ever come to feeling like an astronaut.

Everyone dribbled on their phones, big, small, sleek-cased, the girls' technicoloured fingernails clicking. Cameras flashing, glowing screens. "I can’t believe you don’t have Instagram…How do you cope?" one of them said, staring at me like she could see right through the visor of my astronaut helmet.

I still wasn’t sure if this was a big mistake or a bad idea or both. And I just kept shrugging, chugging my beer so I could stare at the ceiling in hopes Teddy would get the hint, change the topic when one of his Muggle friends asked me about what school I’d gone to, where I lived, my new uni. ( _'No phone? Are you, like, Mormon? Amish?' - 'Do you live on a farm?' - ’Is it a cult thing? Are you in a cult? No, for real, or did you, like, escape a cult or something?')_

Teddy was a seasoned astronaut. He had his whole story straight, not even stumbling over words when he swerved away from upcoming plotholes. For all anyone knew, he lived somewhere in Peckham, and he went to some Police Academy, and I was the phoneless Mormon Amish kid crashing on his couch.

 _'I told them you study accounting or something…'_ he’d said, stumbling towards the Portkey.

I didn’t even know what accounting was. What did accounting people do? _'They -'_ Whirling his hand through the air, bobbing his head from side to side. ' _They account?'_ And I’d told him to get fucked, and he’d laughed, and that was all it ever took for me to forgive him, for me to want to breathe straight out of his mouth. Because I was crazy. Because all it had taken was that laugh - that, and the rare sight of Teddy on a Saturday morning, bundled up in that slack ease that came with sleeping long and sleeping in - and I’d said, _'God, fine, I’ll meet your stupid Muggle friends.',_ and he’d picked me up and whirled me around. I really didn’t think being manhandled was going to be a thing for me. But it was a thing for me.

A really big thing apparently because here we were. And Teddy was good at this, falling into it the way he fell into everything else, composed and calm and weirdly graceful. Metamorphmagi. Born chameleons.

And seeing him like this - Muggle Teddy with his Muggle friends, leaning over the coaster-infested booth with that lopsided grin of his - it made me wonder when he was just being Teddy or when he was just fitting in. Or when he didn’t want to be himself at all.

I was a real shit astronaut apparently, because the guy sitting across from me, the American with the bomber jacket, kept flashing me looks every time he took a swig from his beer. Liam something. He’d come all the way from Georgia ( _'Yup, home of the Okefenokee Swamp Park and the ass emoji._ ' I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask.) He said hon’ a lot and darling, like d _aaa_ rlin’, and he made everything sound warm and chewy, like the cowboys on the telly. Al was right, it did sound like butterscotch, like a long, long taffy pull.

His eyes did that twirly thing when I told him I was 18.

I didn’t know what the two of us were talking about anymore, and I didn’t know if we were talking past each other or if we were just saying things for the sake of saying something. He smiled when he caught me staring at the way he fingered at a dent in the table. I swallowed. I felt like washing my hands. I said something then, something stupid, a thought out loud, and he was laughing the way all Americans laughed, really loud and really wide, head tipped back and then that abrupt stop like a zap, like they were done now but they were expecting you to tickle one more out of them.

It made the whole table look our way. Teddy, next to me, scooted closer, something in his face going dark when his eyes snapped to Liam. I felt the hardness of his knee against mine. It made me a little damp all over, that familiar panting feeling. I wondered if Liam could tell that there was a dip down my back where Teddy’s hand had been when he’d lead me into the pub. How I was so sure I’d feel that spot throb hours later, the stamp of his fingers like a thermal print.

One of the girls at the end of the booth sputtered to life again, gushing about some music festival deep in the desert, and I felt really bad for Muggles not having Portkeys or Floo Networks or wands. Wands in general. How did they get things done? How hadn’t they died yet?

Liam grabbed the coaster I’d been playing with it and pointed it at Teddy. "Where’d you find this goddamn peach, Ted?" _Ted_.

"Don’t call me that - " But Teddy’s hand gripped my knee and he cut me off so fast my words came out garbled. "The nearest LDS church," he said, that strain in his voice when he tried to laugh. Liam was still looking at me when he laughed too, not as loud this time, knocking the coaster’s edge against the table, one time, two times before looking away.

Teddy relaxed and leaned in, mouth too close for me to concentrate. "You okay?" he whispered, like some worried Mum checking in. I didn’t know if that made me feel angry or guilty.

I swallowed, nodded, eyes flicking to Liam who’d started talking to the girl at the end of the booth.

Teddy caught it, and his face did this thing that made it look tighter, the sweep of a vein on his forehead throbbing. I wanted to touch it. "Yeah." I nodded. "'Course." He was too close, and it was too warm, and his mouth was open, and all I could think about was how his hand was still on my knee, and how weirdly ashamed I felt for liking the way he looked at Liam, like he’d caught him touching his things.

"Okay," Teddy said, grabbing his beer. "Okay," I said, grabbing mine, clinking the neck of it against his, feeling foggy from the way he looked at me when we both took a swig.

He squeezed my knee and let go.

 

◆

 

I wasn’t sure how far it went downhill from there. Moving from place to place, we trickled apart, guys staying for girls, girls dragging each other home, couples disappearing into bathroom stalls for so long we left.

And after one round of drinks too many, it turned into one of those nights where it didn’t matter who you were with and who you left behind. Teddy’s friends were loud and weird, and I liked that they had to take pictures of everything and said stuff like, ' _Dare you to snapchat your balls!_ ', and I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded terrifying. And I liked the girl with the jangly bracelets, the eyeliner - Sana, I remembered - long skirt swooshing, necklaces, earrings flashing like an Egyptian queen while she danced through the glowing cones of streetlights.

She pounded her fists against the storefront of a closing shop until someone let her in. Stumbling back out with a tin full of diamond-shaped pastries, she shouted, "It’s the shit!" Roaming her hand over it like a fortune teller looking into her crystal ball.

"Baklava," Teddy said, nudging my shoulder with his. I still liked the way he said it, liked the way he looked when he did. He grabbed one, swirling it over my head until I jumped to take a bite, teeth grazing skin. I looked up at him, chewing, mouth hit with that burst of sweetness. And he swallowed, cleared his throat, stuffed the rest into his mouth. I wondered what it would taste like if I kissed him. "Absolute shit, right?" he said, wiping his fingers on the front of his jacket. I nodded. "Absolute shit."

He smiled, streetlights spilt across his face, the specks of stubble around his jaw. And just when I thought I could get away with it, maybe - because it was late, and we were drunk and delirious and thrilled by anything in the world - lift my hand to his chin to feel it prickle. Sana screeched. She was always screeching, at bartenders and passersby and guys who didn’t stop playing with her bracelets.

I cleared my throat, balled my hand into a fist and stuffed it into my pocket. Turning around, I watched her stumble towards a group of girls, their neon-bra straps flashing, one of them with her heels dangling over a shoulder, feet soiled in the cold.

"Teeeeddy!" That nasty pitched sing-song only girls could do when they were clumped together.

It felt like I’d been hurled back in time, back to bursting hallways and classrooms buzzing, and Teddy, the charmer, sauntering through the mess, because he was always fucking sauntering, the fucking knob. His easy smiles when he leaned into the clusters of girls scheming in the courtyard, telling them all they wanted to hear, how pretty they looked, how much he’d missed them between classes, fondling the trains of their robes. Those hungry eyes on him, _more, Teddy, more, more._

I watched him sway towards them now, all baggy and lax, beaming down at their caked faces glowing in the flare of pub signs. I felt this bite in me, stinging when the girl with a flower garland around her neck, probably ravaged from some cheap tiki bar, reached for Teddy’s collar and spoke into his ear.

A memory flashed through my head: Vic on Christmas Eve, Vic all feline, Vic and her craving and craving.

"Story of my goddamned life, sweetcheeks." I turned towards Liam who was cradling the tin of baklava like a newborn. There was something in the way he stared at me, something knowing, almost like pity. Or maybe opportunity. I bet he was the kind of person who leeched off of others’ leftovers. And I bet he was so good at it you didn’t even notice until you were crouched under his bomber jacket in the back of a cab.

When I looked back at Teddy, twirling the flower-garland girl now, the two of them swaying to the music seeping out of the nearest pub, I pretended like I didn’t know what Liam meant. And I kept pretending the longer the night went on, one more club, one more sports bar, _'Just one last one, guys, swear to god! Just one more!',_ and then some empty hole in the wall where the lady behind the bar tried to chase us out with a broomstick. I felt cotton-boned, floating by the time we found another place, all fog machines and LED lights and ice buckets with sparklers.

Teddy was everywhere at once, handing smiles out like flyers, being anyone’s best friend in the world for a heart-to-heart and a free drink.

He came back to me once, found me somewhere in the bathrooms that smelled like someone had stuffed shit into an air freshener. I swore he was the only person who looked good under fluorescent lights. Eyes bursting blue. And he curled over me, huddled close, and it reminded me of Christmas, of the crunch of snow beneath my boots, the way the light hit his face. He brushed my hair out of my eyes, sticky and taped to my forehead, telling me I looked like a disaster, and I didn’t know how he could make it sound like a compliment, laughing down at me until I was choking on the sound, gripping into the dips of his elbows, _stay with me, please stay with me, stay_ \- before he was gone again, grabbing Sana’s ring-clustered hands to pull her towards the dance floor.

I was damp all over, tired, head humming, and my shirt was still stuck to my front from when someone had spilt their tequila sunrise on me. I couldn’t see right, everything split into hazy twos. I wanted to go. I wanted Teddy to want to go. And I wanted to hold him. I wanted to hold him really long, really, really, really long, because I was done with this. Because this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Because the Portkey had spit us out on the wrong planet, and this planet was infested with screechy smooth girls, and people who wanted to choke themselves with small talk, people who could definitely dance better and drink longer and want someone in reasonable amounts.

I didn’t know why this next thought broadcasted through my head in Al’s sage voice:

_Maybe you like Dunwell so much because you can have Teddy all to yourself in a place full of shrivelled old hags, you needy fucking five-year-old._

Except Al would probably say it nicer, and then like some Trojan Horse, he’d bundle it up in pleasantries about the weather or gnome mating habits (because he was a sicko - we were a family full of sickos). And then I’d tell him to get stuffed, and he’d put his hand on my shoulder, and I’d bat it off, and he’d put it on my other shoulder and tell me that we could talk whenever I was ready, because he was a 200-year-old genie squashed into this tiny awkward body that didn’t know how to stay on a broom for longer than a minute. And sometimes farted when he got nervous. Which was all the time.

But I knew that if Al were here, really, really here, he’d tell me that I wasn’t the only person in Teddy’s life, that nothing was put on hold when I wasn’t there with him, that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to watch out for him, be with him, care. And just because things worked one way in Dunwell, didn’t mean they worked the same outside of it.

I wasn’t in any position to be this selfish, because we hadn’t figured this out yet. We didn’t know what this was. We hadn’t talked, not really, not the way you were supposed to, about what was okay and what wasn’t and _can I kiss you? I want to kiss you. I want to glue our hands together because I’m a fucking psycho, because sometimes, Christ, sometimes I want to lick your face clean off, stuff your hair into my mouth, touch and touch you, touch you anywhere you’ll let me, take anything you’ll give me. Because I’ll take anything, and that’s probably sick. Because I’m sick, and I want you. I want you so much sometimes it replaces the rest of me. Sometimes I disappear._

If I was a better person, if I were serial-farter Al or Mum on her birthdays or just nice, plain nice, maybe I’d take a breath and tell Teddy we needed to have a sit-down tomorrow, and we’d drink tea and eat scones, because the Dunwell Curse turned everyone into elderly raisins with sleep apnea machines.

But I wasn’t nice. I was a dildo. And dildos who weren’t nice marched towards the bar and slapped whatever coins they had onto the counter, yelling, "I’ll have whatever this will get me!" Which was barely a cup of cider, but dildos who weren’t nice chugged it down anyways.

I was sweating now, dizzy, bobbing my head to the music blasting out of cheap speakers, the thud-thud of shot glasses hitting the counter, the closeness of everyone, the loudness. Somewhere in the crowd, I caught the stitched triangle on the back of Liam’s bomber jacket. I fought my way towards him, stumbling over feet and soggy napkins. Liam’s head in a bowl of vapour from the fog machines, Sana there too, her bracelets jangling, rings reflecting laser beams. I was murky all over, swaying in this mass of blue-black bodies.

And then Teddy.

I caught him, dancing next to makeshift DJ booth, the girl with the flower garland by his side, the colours of it burning neon under black lights. Teddy’s white teeth. He was grinning. I could hear it or I could taste it, all my senses jumbled up. And I could feel it too, I swore I did, like a pulse thumping.

I was almost there, close enough to reach out. But Sana tumbled in front of me, grabbing him, dancing him away. His face flashed over her shoulder, his eyes glowing because everything was. And he saw me, that small twitch of _there you are_. My hand in the air. _Here I am._

But then Sana’s long arms wound around Teddy’s neck, and half his face behind hers, his eyes still on me. Until they weren’t, until they were sputtering, and he froze because Sana was kissing him.

I turned around before I could see how long he kissed her back.

Stumbling back out of the crowd, towards the LED-lined stairs, wet and vomit-mopped, feet slipping, my hand twisted around the railing. I shouldered past a chain of guys, popped collars and cologne that made my eyes water. "Hey, watch it, little man." A paw clinched into my shoulder. I ripped it off. "Don’t touch me." And I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe even though I felt myself, couldn’t see with my eyes wide open.

I heard my name when I burst outside, shouldering my way through groups of people huddled around cigarettes and bottles. A Kiosk sign buzzing in the distance like a signal flare. I steered towards it, needed to get to it, couldn’t stand standing still.

"Jamie!"

And all I could hear was Al’s imaginary voice blasting through my head. _Needy fucking five-year-old._

Teddy could kiss whoever he wanted. He could fuck whoever he wanted too. Maybe I was just beyond delusional because I thought the world worked the way it did in those Muggle picture books Grandpa used to sneak into our rooms when we were kids, where optional career choices were milkman or firefighter, and everyone drove mint green bubble cars and drank milkshakes, and the Mums wore aprons, and hand-holding meant marriage, three kids and a mortgage.

I wasn’t just an astronaut when it came to the Muggle world - I was an astronaut when it came to everything else.

"Wait! James." _James_.

It was so unfair.

I stumbled to a stop, barely dodging a cab speeding past, the blare of the horn making my ears pop when I reached the other side of the road. Spinning, spinning. The Kiosk sign blurred into a bright chunk in the distance. I wanted to throw up. Hunching forward, hands on my knees, I tried to catch my breath.

"Christ, you almost got hit!" The weight of a familiar hand on my back. I felt disgusting for wanting to bat it off.

"I want to go home," I said, and it was the first time I could hear myself, heaving and gurgling and finished. "I want - Shit. I just want to go." The ground spun. Closing my eyes just made it worse. I swayed to the side. Teddy caught me, held me in place with his hand on my shoulder. I tried to stand upright, to look at him, but he was nothing but a faceless blob in the dark. I blinked, rubbed my eyes.

"Okay, we can go. We can go. I’ll just tell the others."

"No. No, I know how to get home. You just, you go back to…whoever."

He let me go. "Jamie." A big tremendous sigh. "Jamie," he said again, softer now, like a cheek-stroke. He shook his head. _Oh, Jamie, stupid Jamie, you dimwit dumbo. You needy fucking five-year-old._

"It didn’t mean anything. I mean, we used to, you know," he rubbed a hand across his face, "sometimes. But that was - Not anymore. We don’t. Jamie. I wouldn’t." He was saying my name too much. The things it did to me. "I don’t know how to do this," he said, flapping his hands against his sides. "I’m shit at this. I’m shit. And it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t. It doesn’t."

This was the first time I’d heard him admit he was shit at something - and probably just as shit at it as I was.

But I was five and delusional and not nice, and I shook my head and said, "You don’t have to tell me that. It’s okay, okay? You can do whoever, anyone you want. You’ve got a whole bloody line of people ready to choke on your dick." He flinched. I didn’t mean for it to sound this way, to feel like this. "I don’t care. Because it’s not like we’re - " And I stopped, stumbling back against a storefront, the coolness of it when I leaned my head back.

I didn’t expect Teddy to come closer. Our shoes touched. "It’s not like we’re what?" he said, and his breath hit the crown of my head. I swallowed. "Nothing. Never mind."

He groaned at that, loud and shaking, and it made a group of girls nearby crane their necks. "Get a room."

"Fuck off!" I yelled, and I didn’t hear what they had to say over the clack of their heels down the road. Pulling Teddy into an empty side street, it almost surprised me that he was too caught up in this to turn around and apologise, to tell me to be quiet.

"You always say that. It’s always never mind with you. You never -"

"No, _you_ never," I snapped, and if I had the strength, I’d jab my finger into his chest until I reached his lungs. "You never, either."

"But I want to." I didn’t know if we were talking about the same thing. We weren’t making sense. None of this made sense. "And I want to go home with you," Teddy said, inching closer until our foreheads bumped. He was nothing but a mass of skin and breath, something I could dip my fingers into, nosedive. "James." _James_.

His hands cradling my head so carefully. I closed my eyes, felt everything shift and drop, but Teddy held me tight. So tight it was warm. So warm it felt like sun, the blasting kind, the Studland Bay kind, every summer like the summer of our lives. Teddy and me lying on the floating dock in the middle of the lake, swim trunks damp and pasted to our thighs. Eyes closed against the sky, that blasting pink behind my lids. And the woods, the burr of the birds, water wallowing, splashing, Mum and Dad and Andromeda cackling on the terrace, their wine glasses clinking, someone yelling for Al to put his trunks back on.

' _This is the best feeling in the world_ ,' Teddy had said, and I’d hummed, cracking an eye open to steal a glance, _to look at you, Teddy, all of you, and to know you had no idea what the best feeling in the world actually felt like, to know I’d never be able to share it with you, because some things you just couldn’t say out loud, because you didn’t know how to, because you were mine, you were my best feeling, and how could I have ever made you understand?_

I opened my eyes then, hurled back to this blindspot between streetlights and Teddy’s breath on my face.

"Home," I said. Whispered it, thought it, wished it. "Okay, home." And my hand reached for my wand, and I held it like a live wire, an electric eel. This thing hissing through me. The warmest force. All I could think of was him, _you_ , and his hands and home and us somewhere together in the middle of it. And I didn’t know you could want something so much you didn’t remember what it felt like not to.

My hand knotted into Teddy’s jacket, his hands on the back of my neck, nose trailing down the bridge of mine. My feet curling up, reaching, the scratch of gravel against my soles. 

His lips brushing mine. 

_Home._

I flicked my wand. We disappeared.

 

◆

 

Brain in feet, heart in stomach, each wing of my lungs tucked into ten fingers at once. 

I held him through all of it, felt the universe, felt everything and nothing, time pulling us apart, fusing us together. And then that big sound like a whipcrack when the creaky floor of the flat met our feet. I felt Teddy’s name wedged in the back of my throat, humming there until I opened my mouth. His face still so close.

"Holy shit," he wheezed, stumbling back into the dark, dragging me with him as we bumped against trunks and book towers, the sound of a forgotten glass rolling across the floor. I closed my eyes when I felt the leather of the sofa give way beneath us. A jumble of limbs, my arm where his leg was, his knee against my back. I couldn’t tell our hands apart, didn’t know where I began and he ended. "Holy shit." I didn’t know if he’d said it again or if I’d said it or just thought it really, really loud.

"I did it." I was sure I’d said that. "I did it." Again. Because I did. "You did," Teddy said. And then he was laughing, and I was laughing, and we were so close I didn’t know which sound was mine. 

I shook out of it when Teddy’s hand cradled mine, prying my fingers from my wand and settling it on the closest trunk. I felt it, deep, a thunder. Teddy touching my wand was Teddy touching the most secret part of me. I’d let him hold it for life. I’d let him have it.

"Mrs. Higgs would’ve been proud," he said. And I couldn’t help but think of the first time I’d tried to apparate and ended up dislocating my shoulder. "No, wait," I said. "Make sure there’s not a leg missing or something." I laughed harder when Teddy patted us down, something in me going hot the longer his hands roamed, hooking into the hem of my jumper, that strip of skin. My breath snagged. Teddy caught it, and he smiled and did it again. I felt myself go grabby, my hands around the back of his neck as I towed myself onto his lap.

Eyes closed, I remembered what this had felt like on that night. The night of all nights. 

Teddy’s hands knotted into my hair when he pulled me close. Our foreheads bumped. We weren’t laughing. He was so different like this, no more looseness. There was nothing easy about him when he cupped my face between his palms. He was grave and quiet. Uncovered. And my hands slid from his neck to his jaw, nails grazing the specks of stubble, his chin, his bottom lip. That beam of bright teeth when I tugged. There was so much of him, miles upon mile upon miles. I swallowed, felt everything inside of me brace for it, for the only thing worth happening.

"In my dreams," he said, "you’re always on fire." I couldn’t stop the laugh that punched out of me. I was sure he’d yanked that line out of Lily’s Barbara Cartland novels.

But he was so still and so sombre, and he looked at me like something had unbolted, and it was out there, breathing, touched by the world for the first time. Sometimes I couldn’t believe that he could tell me anything, anything at all, and I’d take his word to the grave.

Teddy groaned and grinned, whipping his head back so far my face met his neck. I didn’t think when I tipped over and put my mouth there, the way I’d wanted to since that night, the way I never forgot to want to. His skin giving way. He tasted like sweat and boy, and I wanted to sink my teeth in. But Teddy’s hands brushed through my hair, and I felt him shudder when he tugged me off. He pulled his head up to look at me. "There’s nothing I’m going to say that won’t sound like absolute - "

"Cheese." I laughed. He nodded, tracing my ears with his fingers. I hummed. It tickled. And then he was grabbing my head again, shaking me a little, shaking me until I was dizzy with it. His eyes. His mouth. His face like something you’d spill across a chapel ceiling. Even like this. Even furrow-browed and frantic.

"Because you make me crazy," he said, nothing but breath. Our foreheads touched again. Sticky. "And I know everyone says that all the time about all sorts of people, but I feel like they say it, and they never, they don’t know what it means, what it really feels like. Because it feels like -" He shook his head. I heard him swallow. "You make me crazy in all the great awful ways. And I swear, sometimes you’re just mad, sometimes you have the emotional range of an angry preschooler, and - " Reeling for words, he started laughing, stopped, started laughing again. "And I wish everyone knew that when you’re not busy telling people you’ll pull their cocks through their eyeballs, you’re the sweetest fucking thing."

His grip tightened so much I was sure he’d crack me apart. I’d let him. I’d let him until there was nothing left to crack. "You’re the sweetest thing, Jamie. The sweetest fucking thing. And I care. About you - I care so, so much." His mouth on my cheek, wet and warm, on my chin, my jaw, the corner of my eyes, the bridge of my nose. "So much." The space between my eyebrows, my forehead.

I’d never heard him swear this much. And I’d never heard him sound like he had so much to say he didn’t know where to start or how to. And I’d never heard anyone call me sweet…when I was a loud overreacter, a not-nice overthinker. 

_The sweetest fucking thing._

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t tell him, wouldn’t know how to, that this was everything. He was everything. He was my best feeling. And I couldn’t keep this up anymore, not for the life of me, and my hands bunched the hair at the nape of his neck, wispy and soft and caked in leftover gel. That choking sound he made. I heard him say my name through the haze, over and over. Until he fell quiet. Because he had to. Because I was kissing him, and if he said one more thing, I’d blast him into space like a bottle rocket with my wand shoved up his arse.

All the summers I’d wondered what his hands would feel like, his hands in places no one else had ever had their hands before. All the Christmases I’d watched his mouth nip at the edge of a glass, fingers in his hair, wondering and wishing and maybe waiting too, waiting without knowing if I’d wait till the end. If I’d have it in me. Or if the waiting would, so incredibly, be worthwhile.

And the Teddy kissing me now - and kissing me until I was sure I’d stay pried open like this, blown apart for the rest of my fucking life - was the same Teddy who’d taught me how to swim, fly a broom, blow up a gnome hole, pack a punch, the Teddy who’d smuggled jelly slugs into my pockets when I wasn’t looking, who’d snuck me out to the playground when I couldn’t sleep at night, spun me on the merry-go-round until my heart popped and my brain shook and my soul was somewhere up there splattered across the sky.

The Teddy who’d had my back since the day I realised I’d needed someone to cover it. The Teddy I knew like the rest of me. And the Teddy I knew like the rest of me was nothing like the Teddy I’d imagined. 

Sometimes I thought we got too comfortable in that little nook of longing-for, to cocoon ourselves in it so tightly, this thing that wasn’t real or right, but when we did have it, finally, maybe we didn’t recognise it at all.

The Teddy touching me back in my dreams wasn’t the same Teddy touching me back outside of them.

And I remembered Birdie standing there in her kitchen with her heart in her mouth. _'We never get what we want.'_

I guessed we didn’t. Because in the end, I didn’t think we really knew what we wanted or who we thought we did. Because in my dreams, I never thought of a Teddy who was sad in dry bathtubs, who lugged himself home at night and pretended nothing was wrong when I turned the lights on, a Teddy who visited his parents every week, who stood there, waiting for something that would never happen, a Teddy that had friends with whom, for the littlest while, for a night, he didn’t have to be himself because sometimes maybe he couldn’t stand to be.

But Teddy was here. He was with me. His hands everywhere, his soft insistent mouth, still drunk and dazed and warm, and he was trying to say my name with my tongue in his mouth, and he was smiling, and our teeth clacked, and he smelled like fog machines and the end of a long, long night. And he was beautiful. The kind that made you want to cry a little, like a winning Quidditch strike, like your first time driving over 150 in a rickety car with malfunctioning airbags, like a bottle of whiskey in a dry bathtub full of silent confessions.

I saw him. Like this, I saw him. And I thought we never knew how much we cared for someone until we touched them and let them touch us back. I wanted him, _I want you_ , with all of myself gathered at the root of me. And feeling like this wasn’t stupid, and this wasn’t simple, it wouldn’t make sense, ever, because some things never did. And I wasn’t sure. Because I wasn’t supposed to be. Because that was okay.

I didn’t know when we’d stopped, when we were just leaning into each other, breathing. Eyes closed, eyes open. That warm washing-over of feeling.

"What now?"

"Anything you want," he said.

 _Anything_ , I thought. _Everything_.

 

 

 

 

 

◆ F I N ◆

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The day I don't quote Blue Valentine is the day I die. And the day I don't write about sad charming boys with great hair is also the day I die....And don't get me wrong, like I love cocky confident Jamie, but he's also just a kid? He's insecure and impulsive and anxious and needy (literally every teenager ever), he's so dumb and I love him
> 
> this ended up being a little all over the place, but it just felt good to write for the sake of it, I feel like as weird as fanfiction can be sometimes it's the only place where there's no pressure at all, and it's just fun and a nice break from everything and I've missed it 
> 
> Anyways, hope you guys have the loveliest day and thanks for sticking around even with all the cheese
> 
> [tumblr](https://the-tortellini-man.tumblr.com/)//[twitter](https://twitter.com/its_me_pastaboy)


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